Shurkin: True Genius

TRUE GENIUS:
THE LIFE AND WORK OF RICHARD GARWIN,
THE MOST INFLUENTIAL SCIENTIST YOU NEVER HEARD OF
Joel N. Shurkin
Prometheus, March 15, 2017; $25
ISBN-10: 1633882232; ISBN-13: 978-1633882232

Shurkin reports:

Several years ago a group of physicists in Washington associated with the defense and intelligence community asked me if I were interested in doing a biography of a scientist I never heard of but one virtually everyone in the field admired and respected: Richard Garwin.

Garwin was just about the last of the great physicists of the 20th century, a protégé of the great Enrico Fermi. Fermi called him the smartest student he ever had. The kicker that sucked me in was that it was Garwin, not Edward Teller, who designed the first hydrogen bomb. He did in three weeks what Teller couldn’t do in years.

And then there were his multiple inventions such as the first ATM, spy satellites and satellite navigation, the touch screen, MRIs, the laser printer, and his activities in the Vietnam war. He was the scientist, it turned out, who killed the American Supersonic Transport.

Garwin also spent most of his life reducing the chances that anyone would actually use his bomb. Every disarmament treaty has his fingerprints on it. He became one of the most political scientists in America and the bane of the Pentagon.

My wife and I met Garwin and his wife for dinner one night in Washington, and he agreed I could write his biography. He really, finally, wanted credit for his life’s work. Since much of what he did was classified, several scientists with higher clearances than I had pitched in. The book contains the first complete description of how the first H-bomb came to be, some of it from documents once classified, and, for all I know, a few that still are. I didn’t ask.

Meanwhile, I had years of “Garwin dumps,” waking up in the morning to see what he sent me that day. My Scrivener file was enormous. We did most of the interviews on Skype.

With the death of Sid Drell last autumn, Garwin is the sole survivor of the last golden age of physics, and the last of the time when science made a difference to government.

Contact info:

• Joel Shurkin, 410-696-4716, joel@nasw.org
• Publicist: Cheryl Quimba, 800-853-7545, CQuimba@prometheusbooks.com
• Book website: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545738/true-genius-by-joel-n-shurkin/9781633882232/

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