Science

Richard L. Garwin, a Creator of the Hydrogen Bomb, Dies at 97

Published

6 months ago

May 14, 2025

Richard L. Garwin, a Creator of the Hydrogen Bomb, Dies at 97

Richard L. Garwin, an architect of America’s hydrogen bomb, who shaped defense policies for postwar governments and laid the groundwork for insights into the structure of the universe as well as for medical and computer marvels, died on Tuesday at his home in Scarsdale, N.Y. He was 97.

His death was confirmed by his son Thomas.

A polymathic physicist and geopolitical thinker, Dr. Garwin was only 23 when he built the world’s first fusion bomb. He later became a science adviser to many presidents, designed Pentagon weapons and satellite reconnaissance systems, argued for a Soviet-American balance of nuclear terror as the best bet for surviving the Cold War, and championed verifiable nuclear arms control agreements.

While his mentor, the Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, called him “the only true genius I have ever met,” Dr. Garwin was not the father of the hydrogen bomb. The Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller and the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, who developed theories for a bomb, may have greater claims to that sobriquet.

In 1951-52, however, Dr. Garwin, at the time an instructor at the University of Chicago and just a summer consultant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, designed the actual bomb, using the Teller-Ulam ideas. An experimental device code-named Ivy Mike, it was shipped to the Western Pacific and tested on an atoll in the Marshall Islands.

Intended only to prove the fusion concept, the device did not even resemble a bomb. It weighed 82 tons, was undeliverable by airplane and looked like a gigantic thermos bottle. Soviet scientists, who did not test a comparable device until 1955, derisively called it a thermonuclear installation.

But at the Enewetak Atoll on Nov. 1, 1952, it spoke: An all-but-unimaginable fusion of atoms set off a vast, instant flash of blinding light, soundless to distant observers, and a fireball two miles wide with a force 700 times greater than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Its mushroom cloud soared 25 miles and expanded to 100 miles across.

Because secrecy shrouded the development of America’s thermonuclear weapons programs, Dr. Garwin’s role in creating the first hydrogen bomb was virtually unknown for decades outside a small circle of government defense and intelligence officials. It was Dr. Teller, whose name had long been associated with the bomb, who first publicly credited him.

“The shot was fired almost precisely according to Garwin’s design,” Dr. Teller said in a 1981 statement that acknowledged the crucial role of the young prodigy. Still, that belated recognition got little notice, and Dr. Garwin long remained unknown publicly.

Compared with later thermonuclear weapons, Dr. Garwin’s bomb was crude. Its raw power nonetheless recalled films of the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945, and the appalled reaction of its creator, J. Robert Oppenheimer, reflecting upon the sacred Hindu text of the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

For Dr. Garwin, it was something less.

“I never felt that building the hydrogen bomb was the most important thing in the world, or even in my life at the time,” he told Esquire magazine in 1984. Asked about any feelings of guilt, he said: “I think it would be a better world if the hydrogen bomb had never existed. But I knew the bombs would be used for deterrence.”

A Pivot to I.B.M.

Although the first hydrogen bomb was constructed to his specifications, Dr. Garwin was not even present to witness its detonation at Enewetak. “I’ve never seen a nuclear explosion,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2018. “I didn’t want to take the time.”

After his success on the hydrogen bomb project, Dr. Garwin said, he found himself at a crossroads in 1952. He could return to the University of Chicago, where he had earned his doctorate under Fermi and was now an assistant professor, with the promise of life at one of the nation’s most prestigious academic institutions.

Or he could accept a far more flexible job at the International Business Machines Corporation. It offered a faculty appointment and use of the Thomas J. Watson Laboratory at Columbia University, with wide freedom to pursue his research interests. It would also let him continue to work as a government consultant at Los Alamos and in Washington.

He chose the I.B.M. deal, and it lasted for four decades, until his retirement.

For I.B.M., Dr. Garwin worked on an endless stream of pure and applied research projects that yielded an astonishing array of patents, scientific papers and technological advances in computers, communications and medicine. His work was crucial in developing magnetic resonance imaging, high-speed laser printers and later touch-screen monitors.

A dedicated maverick, Dr. Garwin worked hard for decades to advance the hunt for gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein had predicted. In 2015, the costly detectors he backed were able to successfully observe the ripples, opening a new window on the universe.

Meantime, Dr. Garwin continued to work for the government, consulting on national defense issues. As an expert on weapons of mass destruction, he helped select priority Soviet targets and led studies on land, sea and air warfare involving nuclear-armed submarines, military and civilian aircraft, and satellite reconnaissance and communication systems. Much of his work continued to be secret, and he remained largely unknown to the public.

He became an adviser to such Presidents as Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. He also became known as a voice against President Ronald Reagan’s proposals for a space-based missile system, popularly called Star Wars, to defend the nation against nuclear attack. It was never built.

One of Dr. Garwin’s celebrated battles had nothing to do with national defense. In 1970, as a member of Nixon’s science advisory board, he ran afoul of the president’s support for development of the supersonic transport plane. He concluded that the SST would be expensive, noisy, bad for the environment and a commercial dud. Congress dropped its funding. Britain and France subsidized the development of their own SST, the Concorde, but Dr. Garwin’s predictions proved largely correct, and interest faded.

Clashes With Military

A small, professorial man with thinning flyaway hair and a gentle voice more suited to college lectures than a congressional hot seat, Dr. Garwin became an almost legendary figure in the defense establishment, giving speeches, writing articles and testifying before lawmakers on what he called misguided Pentagon choices.

Some of his feuds with the military were bitter and long-running. They included fights over the B-1 bomber, the Trident nuclear submarine and the MX missile system, a network of mobile, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles that were among the most lethal weapons in history. All eventually joined America’s vast arsenal.

While Dr. Garwin was frustrated by such setbacks, he pressed ahead. His core message was that America should maintain a strategic balance of nuclear power with the Soviet Union. He opposed any weapon or policy that threatened to upset that balance, because, he said, it kept the Russians in check. He liked to say that Moscow was more interested in live Russians than dead Americans.

Dr. Garwin supported reductions of nuclear arsenals, including the 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), negotiated by President Carter and Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet premier. But Dr. Garwin insisted that mutually assured destruction was the key to keeping the peace.

In 2021, he joined 700 scientists and engineers, including 21 Nobel laureates, who signed an appeal asking President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to pledge that the United States would never be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. Their letter also called for an end to the American practice of giving the president sole authority to order the use of nuclear weapons; a curb on that authority, they said, would be “an important safeguard against a possible future president who is unstable or who orders a reckless attack.”

The ideas were politically delicate, and Mr. Biden made no such pledge.

Dr. Garwin told Quest magazine in 1981, “The only thing nuclear weapons are good for, and have ever been good for, is massive destruction, and by that threat deterring nuclear attack: If you slap me, I’ll clobber you.”

A Whiz Kid at 5

Richard Lawrence Garwin was born in Cleveland on April 19, 1928, the older of two sons of Robert and Leona (Schwartz) Garwin. His father was a teacher of electronics at a technical high school during the day and a projectionist in a movie theater at night. His mother was a legal secretary. At an early age, Richard, called Dick, showed remarkable intelligence and technical ability. By 5, he was repairing family appliances.

He and his brother, Edward, attended public schools in Cleveland. Dick graduated at 16 from Cleveland Heights High School in 1944 and earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1947 from what is now Case Western Reserve University.

In 1947, he married Lois Levy. She died in 2018. In addition to his son Thomas, he is survived by another son, Jeffrey; a daughter, Laura; five grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Under Fermi’s tutelage at the University of Chicago, Dr. Garwin earned a master’s degree in 1948 and a doctorate in 1949, scoring the highest marks on doctoral exams ever recorded by the university. He then joined the faculty, but at Fermi’s urging spent his summers at the Los Alamos lab, where his H-bomb work unfolded.

After retiring in 1993, Dr. Garwin chaired the State Department’s Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board until 2001. He served in 1998 on the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States.

Dr. Garwin’s home in Scarsdale is not far from his longtime base at the I.B.M. Watson Labs, which had moved in 1970 from Columbia University to Yorktown Heights, in Westchester County.

He held faculty appointments at Harvard and Cornell as well as Columbia. He held 47 patents, wrote some 500 scientific research papers and wrote many books, including “Nuclear Weapons and World Politics” (1977, with David C. Gompert and Michael Mandelbaum), and “Megawatts and Megatons: A Turning Point in the Nuclear Age?” (2001, with Georges Charpak).

He was the subject of a biography, “True Genius: The Life and Work of Richard Garwin, the Most Influential Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of” (2017), by Joel N. Shurkin.

His many honors included the 2002 National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest award for science and engineering achievements, given by President George W. Bush, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, bestowed by President Barack Obama in 2016.

“Ever since he was a Cleveland kid tinkering with his father’s movie projectors, he’s never met a problem he didn’t want to solve,” Mr. Obama said in a lighthearted introduction at the White House. “Reconnaissance satellites, the M.R.I., GPS technology, the touch-screen — all bear his fingerprints. He even patented a mussel washer for shellfish — that I haven’t used. The other stuff I have.”

William J. Broad and Ash Wu contributed reporting.

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Science

Autistic youth are more likely to think about and die from suicide. What parents need to know

Published

56 minutes ago

November 23, 2025

Press Room

Autistic youth are more likely to think about and die from suicide. What parents need to know

As diverse as the experiences of children and teens on the autism spectrum are, one sobering fact holds true: Autistic youth are more likely to think about and die from suicide, and at earlier ages, than their neurotypical peers.

The Times spent months interviewing autistic self-advocates, families, physicians and researchers to understand the factors behind this crisis and the changes that could better support youth and their families.

Solutions are still in their infancy, but autism researchers and advocates are working to develop screening tools, safety plans and therapies based on the unique strengths and differences of an autistic brain.

A crucial first step is educating parents, pediatricians and other community professionals on the particular risks and challenges facing autistic youth, and why taking neurodiversity into account could help reduce the number of young lives lost too soon.

Here are some key findings:

Autistic youth are more likely to struggle with suicidal thoughts and mental health conditions than non-autistic kids.

Suicide is a leading cause of death in the U.S. for kids between the ages of 10 and 18. For autistic teens and children, the risk is higher. One 2023 meta-analysis found that some 10% of autistic children and teens had attempted suicide, a rate more than twice that of their non-autistic peers.

About 20% of U.S. high schoolers disclosed suicidal thoughts in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore asked caregivers of 900 autistic children between 8 and 17 if the children had thought about ending their lives, 35% said yes. Nearly 1 in 5 said their child had made a plan.

Children across the autism spectrum are far more likely to also be diagnosed with mental health conditions than their allistic, or non-autistic, peers.

A 2021 study of more than 42,000 caregivers of children between ages 3 and 17 found that 78% of autistic children had at least one co-occurring psychiatric condition, compared to 14% of non-autistic kids. Contributing factors include the stress of living in a world that’s sensorially overwhelming or socially impenetrable.

Autistic children without intellectual disabilities may be at greater risk.

The diagnostic definition of autism has evolved over the years and now includes children who cope by “masking”: consciously or unconsciously suppressing autistic traits in order to fit in at school or in social environments. For children with a propensity for masking, autism is often diagnosed much later in childhood or even adulthood.

Many children who mask are able to participate in mainstream classes or activities. But constantly deciphering and mimicking social responses is cognitively and emotionally exhausting. Masking is strongly correlated with depression, anxiety and suicide.

“Masking is actually a risk factor of suicide for autistic people, and it has a negative effect on one’s mental health,” said Lisa Morgan, founder of the Autism and Suicide Prevention Workgroup, who is autistic herself.

Research has found that autistic people with a higher IQ are both more likely to mask and more likely to suffer from anxiety and other mental health conditions.

In one 2023 study from the University of Iowa, autistic kids with an IQ of 120 or higher were nearly six times more likely to have suicidal thoughts than autistic children with an average IQ. For non-autistic children, the opposite was true: Higher cognitive ability was associated with a decreased risk of suicide.

Crisis warning signs often look different in autistic kids, and mental health interventions designed for neurotypical youth may not be as effective for them.

Most mental health interventions start with a provider verbally asking a deceptively simple question: What are you feeling?

But up to 80% of autistic kids have alexithymia, or difficulty identifying and describing one’s own internal emotional state. For this reason, “it makes sense that all of the interventions that have been designed for a neurotypical youth probably aren’t going to translate in the same way to autistic youth,” said Jessica Schwartzman, director of the Training and Research to Empower NeuroDiversity Lab at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and assistant professor of pediatrics at USC’s Keck School of Medicine.

A neurodiverse workgroup of researchers has identified crisis warning signs specific to autistic people, including a noticeable decline in verbal communication abilities.

“Oftentimes it’s thought that somebody might be really agitated or show a lot of emotional distress when they are talking about wanting to die,” said Danielle Roubinov, an associate professor and director of the Child and Adolescent Anxiety and Mood Disorders Program at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “An autistic individual might not do that. They might say it in a really matter-of-fact way, or they might have a really hard time articulating it.”

Asking about suicide could save a life.

There is a common misconception that asking about suicide could plant the idea in a child’s head and lead to further harm. If anything, researchers said, it’s protective.

Ask clearly, directly and in whatever format a child is most comfortable with, Schwartzman said. Some autistic children may prefer a text or written letter, for example, rather than a direct verbal conversation.

Researchers are looking for low-cost ways to tailor existing therapies to better serve autistic kids, and to educate the medical community on the need to use them.

Experts are currently working on modifications to the standard screening tool that providers use to identify suicidality, as well as the Stanley-Brown safety plan, where patients list coping strategies and contacts on a one-page sheet that can be easily accessed in a crisis. Studies on the effectiveness of versions tailored for autistic people are underway.

Changes to the way providers interact with autistic children can also make a difference. Sensory overwhelm can be destabilizing, and an autistic child may first need a quiet place with dim lighting to calm themselves, and extra time to process and form answers to questions.

The most effective way to reduce depression, anxiety and the mental harm of masking is to ensure that autistic kids have the support they need, advocates and clinicians say, and don’t feel like they have to change everything about themselves in order to fit in.

“Suicide prevention for autistic people is being accepted for who they are, being able to be who they are without masking,” Morgan said.

If you or someone you know is experiencing thoughts of suicide, help is available. Call 988 to connect to trained mental health counselors or text “HOME” to 741741 in the U.S. and Canada to reach the Crisis Text Line.

This article was reported with the support of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship’s Kristy Hammam Fund for Health Journalism.

Science

Washington state resident dies of new H5N5 form of bird flu

Published

19 hours ago

November 22, 2025

Press Room

Washington state resident dies of new H5N5 form of bird flu

The first person infected with the H5N5 bird flu has died, according to health officials in Washington.

The person, who lived in Grays Harbor County, had been hospitalized earlier this month in Kings County, where Seattle is located.

Officials from the Washington State Department of Health did not release the person’s name, age or gender. According to a news release from Grays Harbor County health officials last week, the person was considered “older” and had underlying health conditions. Their symptoms included a high fever, confusion and trouble breathing.

The person had a backyard flock consisting of mixed domestic poultry.

Testing by the health department found virus in the “environment of the flock … making exposure to the domestic poultry, their environment, or wild birds the most likely source of exposure for this patient.”

Officials at the state’s health department said they were monitoring other people who were exposed to the flock and environment.

This particular strain of bird flu, H5N5, had never been seen in a person before. It appeared first in 2023, infecting birds and mammals in eastern Canada.

According to research published last year on the novel strain, some infected animals carried a key mutation in the virus that allows it to transfer more easily between mammals.

Epidemiologists and virologists worry that avian influenza could generate a pandemic if allowed to spread and mutate. For instance, the H5N1 virus circulating in dairy cattle in North America is one mutation away from being able to spread easily between people.

Every time a bird flu virus infects a person, concerns grow that it could change, becoming more transmissible or more deadly. For instance, if a sickened person also has another flu virus replicating in their body, there’s concern the viruses could exchange genetic material. Just by having an opportunity to replicate and evolve millions of times in the human body, it could acquire deadly mutations.

Health officials say the risk to the public remains low and that no other people involved have tested positive for avian influenza. They say there is no evidence of transmission of the virus between people, but they are monitoring anyone who was in close contact with the patient.

Science

CDC replaces website on vaccines and autism with false and misleading statements

Published

2 days ago

November 21, 2025

Press Room

CDC replaces website on vaccines and autism with false and misleading statements

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has altered its website on autism and vaccines, removing unequivocal statements that immunizations don’t cause the neurodevelopmental disorder and replacing them with inaccurate and misleading information about the links between the shots and autism.

Until Wednesday, the CDC page, “Autism and Vaccines,” began: “Studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing autism spectrum disorder (ASD).”

This was followed, in large font, by the blunt statement: “Vaccines do not cause autism.”

The rest of the page summarized some of the CDC’s own studies into autism and vaccine ingredients, none of which found any causal links between the two.

On Wednesday, the page was altered so that it now begins: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”

The words “Vaccines do not cause autism” still appear near the top, but with an asterisk that leads to a note at the bottom.

“The header ‘Vaccines do not cause autism’ has not been removed due to an agreement with the chair of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that it would remain on the CDC website,” the site states.

The chair of that committee, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), cast the deciding vote to advance Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment as Health and Human Services secretary, in exchange for Kennedy’s promise that he wouldn’t erode public confidence in vaccines.

“What parents need to hear right now is vaccines for measles, polio, hepatitis B and other childhood diseases are safe and effective and will not cause autism. Any statement to the contrary is wrong, irresponsible, and actively makes Americans sicker,” Cassidy said in a post on X on Thursday afternoon. “Families are getting sick and people are dying from vaccine-preventable deaths, and that tragedy needs to stop.” Cassidy’s office did not immediately respond to further requests for comment Thursday.

“Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities,” HHS spokesman Andrew Dixon said in an email. “We are updating the CDC’s website to reflect gold standard, evidence-based science.”

The news was met with outrage and alarm by scientists and advocates.

“Can we trust what’s coming from CDC anymore? I don’t know the answer to that question,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the infectious disease committee at the American Academy of Pediatrics, adding that the website change reflects a “tragic moment” for U.S. public health.

“We are appalled to find that the content on the CDC webpage ‘Autism and Vaccines’ has been changed and distorted, and is now filled with anti-vaccine rhetoric and outright lies about vaccines and autism,” the nonprofit Autism Science Foundation said in a statement. “The CDC’s previous science- and evidence-based website has been replaced with misinformation and now actually contradicts the best available science.”

Alison Singer, the organization’s co-founder and president, expressed further frustration.

“Just like we no longer study whether the Earth is flat, at some point with regard to autism and vaccines, you have to call it and say ‘enough is enough,’” Singer said. “We don’t have an unlimited amount of money with which to study autism, and if we keep asking the same questions, we will never find the true causes of autism.”

The current CDC page now says the rise in autism diagnoses correlates with an increase in the number of vaccines given to infants. Multiple researchers have argued that the rise in autism spectrum disorder diagnoses is better explained by an expanding diagnostic definition of the disorder, along with better monitoring and diagnosis for more children.

“This issue has been studied exhaustively, and it has been shown over and over again that vaccines do not cause autism,” said Colin Killick, executive director of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network. “This administration continues to lie about autism in ways that endanger both our community and the broader population.”