Richard Garwin, Chicago physicist who created the hydrogen bomb and worked to see it wasn't used, dead at 97

Richard Garwin, Chicago physicist who created the hydrogen bomb and worked to see it wasn't used, dead at 97

He served as a science adviser, focusing on nuclear deterrence, to every U.S. president who served during his lifetime. Enrico Fermi, his mentor, once called him “the only true genius I have ever met.”

Richard Garwin, Chicago physicist who created the hydrogen bomb and worked to see it wasn’t used, dead at 97

Wonder boy. Whiz kid. Prodigy. Genius. The nation’s top physicists hadn’t seen the likes of Dick Garwin before. When he was 23 and an assistant physics instructor at the University of Chicago, Mr. Garwin spent the first of his several summers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where he was granted access to the nation’s nuclear secrets — including the first-generation fission-based atomic weapons developed there just years earl…