Richard Garwin died on May 13, 2025 at the age of 97, and is sometimes referred to as "the most influential scientist you've never heard of." He received a PhD from Enrico Fermi's Nobel Prize Winner and Einstein's friend in the 21-year-old physics field, which he called Garwin the only real genius he had ever met.

He is a curious diversity of almost everything, and he is one of the few elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine. He owns 47 patents and has published more than 500 scientific papers. The huge miscellaneous things about his papers and negotiations can be found in the Garwin archives of the American Federation of Scientists.

Garwin is known for his engineering design for the first ever thermonuclear explosion, which has caused the idea of ​​Teller-Ulam to trigger a fusion reaction with radiation pressure to become a working hydrogen bomb, 700 times the power of the hiroshima bomb. He did this at the age of 23. Over the next few decades, he contributed to countless other military advances, including the invention of key technologies for enabling reconnaissance satellites.

Weapon Control Advocate

However, Calvin was also an advocate for the long-term advocacy of nuclear weapons control, ultimately nuclear disarmament. Now working on nuclear deterrence and weapons control at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, I met Calvin as a relentless and effective player in dialogue with scientists from Russia, China, India and elsewhere, as well as current or former officials, in an effort to limit nuclear weapons and reduce hazards.

Garwin was an early participant in the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for its disarmament efforts. In 1980, he was also a founding member of the U.S. Council on International Security and Arms Control, where he continued to discuss ideas about reducing nuclear hazards with foreign colleagues throughout his life.

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The deep respect for him by top nuclear weapons in Russia and China is obvious - although he often tells them outright that he thinks his arguments are wrong. At one time, at a seminar in Beijing, Calvin began his remarks after listening to China's plans to develop a nuclear "breeder" reactor plan, saying, "It's a well-designed breeder plan that will fail," and then sheds light on why he thinks it is.

Since non-governmental experts are free to explore ideas lacking by government negotiators, these dialogues play a key role in developing the concept of leading to nuclear weapons control agreements, I think, helping to end the Cold War. For example, a team of committees, including Calvin, helped convince Chinese weapons scientists that their countries no longer need nuclear tests and should sign a comprehensive test ban treaty - which took place shortly after the discussion.

Only a few weeks before his death, he and I and others attended a Zoom meeting with Russian nuclear weapons experts on what initial steps should be taken if US-Russia political relations improve enough so that they can resume discussions on nuclear constraints and risk reduction.

Calvin's mind seemed to be immediately interested in everything - he had a humorous sense of humor that could energize a dry meeting. When I directed a study at the National Academy on the treatment of bone treatments for nuclear weapons after the Cold War, he would send an email with in-depth insights into some of the issues in the study, and then searched the parking arrangements for the meeting for the same lengthy period.

We put him in charge of evaluating all the particularly strange options to handle plut. Once, when he was schematically on the blackboard, he had the option to dilute the p in the ocean, he pulled out the ship that was about to do his work and began to draw many smaller ships. Someone asked him what that was and he said, "Oh, that's the ship of Greenpeace."

Science, technology and policy

Calvin's incredible energy is concentrated in three broad areas: basic science, new technology and advising governments.

In basic science, he made significant contributions to the detection and research of gravity waves and helped discover what physicists call weak nuclear forces that violate parity violations - a discovery that is one of the basis of the standard model for the fundamental forces of the universe.

Beyond new technologies, weapons and satellites, he played a key role in touch screens, magnetic resonance imaging, laser printers and GPS technologies, allowing us all to get instructions on our phones. From 1952 to 1993, he was a researcher at IBM.

Garwin advised the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee, Jason Come, the Senior Defense Advisory Committee, to lead the State Department’s Arms Control and Non-Amplification Advisory Committee (now known as the International Security Advisory Committee). He made a significant contribution to thinking about issues ranging from anti-Star Wars to missile defense. He is a spicy critic of the Reagan administration’s “Star Wars” missile defense program, pointing to the various ways the enemy can defeat it more cheaply. His range is excellent: He was asked to provide ideas to limit the blowout of the Deepwater Horizon oil rigs and manage the Covid-19-19 pandemic.

His curiosity is not limited to important issues. Once, when I sat next to him waiting for the meeting to begin, he told me that if you pick up the superball (a small, extremely elastic rubber ball) and bounce it diagonally on the floor so that it bounces to the bottom of the table, it bounces back to the same position on the floor and then back to your hands. I said I didn't believe it for a minute - I'd surely bounce forward until it hits the other side of the table. He gave me an explanation that I don't fully understand, involving the energy that moves forward into torque, which then converts backward into energy that moves backward.

When I got home, I received a courier package from him containing an article he wrote in the American Journal of Physics entitled "Kinematics of Super Furry Big Balls" and explained this with a page of the equation. The first number in the paper is a stick drawing for bounces like this with a footnote on it: "This is what LW Alverez showed me using WHAM-O SUPER BALL." Luis Alverez is a Nobel Prize in Physics.

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A respectful life

Calvin's glory is obvious to everyone who meets him and earns his wide recognition. In addition to electing all three national academies, he was awarded the National Medal of Science by President George W. Bush in 2002. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In all these activities, Calvin is a family member. His marriage to his beloved wife, Lois, lasted for more than 70 years until his death in 2018. They have three children, five grandchildren and one great-grandson.

Garwin has promoted our understanding of the universe and has benefited millions of people greatly. Like today’s nuclear danger, the world is far from the nuclear edge compared to Richard Garwin’s never-born nuclear edge.