Richard L. Garwin died this week on Tuesday, May 13, 2025. He was born April 19, 1928, you can do the math. He lived a long time but I still don’t see how he did everything he did. I interviewed him a lot over the years, and stayed in touch even after his health made it harder for him to do the things I interviewed him about. I wrote this post April 11, 2014, after a documentary about him had just come out, and I run the post again, updated, because it says what I have to say about him.
Garwin: the Movie opens with an old, steady, precise hand on a computer keyboard, scrolling through now-declassified documents. Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower make announcements, and newspapers flash headlines about our splendid new hydrogen bomb. Then the blossom of a mushroom cloud unfolds; and John F. Kennedy talks about Russian missiles in Cuba; and the same old hand places a pill case near the keyboard, then dumps out his pills. Lyndon Johnson explains the complex problems of Vietnam and soldiers shoot their way through a jungle, and the old hand is tieing up a necktie. Walter Cronkite reports Three-Mile Island, and the old hand pulls on a suit jacket and slings a heavy backpack over his shoulder. The oil wells of Kuwait explode into a fiery smoking darkness, which becomes the smoking darkness of the Twin Towers, which slides into the tsunami slipping in slow motion over the drowning towns of Japan; and the old hand picks up an umbrella, and a heavily-burdened, slightly baggy old guy in a nice suit and tie stumps out onto the sidewalk, gets in a cab, and goes to DC. The film title slowly spells out the name, Garwin. The old guy gets out of the cab, slowly, creakily — he’s 86, after all — and walks past a group of anti-nuke demonstrators, stops and looks at them for a second, then walks on. He’s seen them before. He walks into the Executive Office Building. You know, he says, the president and his national security advisor, aside from their positions, “are really just ordinary people. And they need to make decisions and they don’t have time to learn. So the only thing that really works is education.”
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Richard L. Garwin, a physicist and inventor, has been educating politicians on the scientific realities, whether they want him to or not, in every administration since Eisenhower’s. He educates them on the physics of nuclear weapons, missile defense, jungle warfare, burning oil wells, terrorist attacks, and of nuclear plant meltdowns. The people who made the movie about him, Richard Breyer and Anand Kamalakar, originally pitched a film on the history of science in America, using Garwin like Zelig or Forrest Gump, they said, because at important moments in history, he always showed up. “But when we got to know him and hung out with him,” Kamalakar said, “it evolved into this other film about a person who built this horrible thing and worked his whole life to dance around it.”
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