Herbert York

Published on Monday 25 May 2009 20:57

Nuclear physicist and advocate of arms control

Born: 24 November, 1921, in New York.

Died: 19 May, 2009, in California, aged 87.

HERBERT York was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb and later became a leading advocate of arms control and nuclear test bans.

By his own account, York played a rather minor role on the Manhattan Project. But in the 1950s he was an important scientist working on the development of nuclear weapons, first for the new Lawrence Livermore Laboratory at the University of California, which he directed from 1952 to 1958, and later as a top Pentagon scientist in the Eisenhower administration.

His work on weapons systems convinced him of the need for arms control and a ban on nuclear testing, views he articulated as an adviser or arms-control negotiator to several presidents and in books like Race to Oblivion: A Participant's View of the Arms Race (1970) and Making Weapons, Talking Peace: A Physicist's Journey From Hiroshima to Geneva (1987).

"Herb York's life was an unsurpassed record of achievement in science, education and national security," Harold Brown, the defence secretary under US president Jimmy Carter, said. "In the national government, in California, and in international meetings and negotiations, he was dedicated to peace while being realistic about security needs."

Herbert Frank York was born in Rochester, New York, and studied physics at the University of Rochester, earning a bachelor's and master's degree in 1942. After graduating, he joined the staff of the radiation laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was recruited for the Manhattan Project, working at the Berkeley laboratory and in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on the electromagnetic separation of uranium 235.

After the Second World War ended, York returned to Berkeley, where he earned a doctorate in physics in 1949 and, after working as a researcher, joined the physics department in 1951. At the age of 28 he was named director of the newly created Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where he oversaw programmes under the sponsorship of the Atomic Energy Commission that included work on developing the hydrogen bomb.

After the Soviet Union began putting satellites into orbit, the Eisenhower administration scrambled to step up space and weapons research. In March 1958, York became the first chief scientist at the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon, directing space and anti-missile research. Later that year, he was named director of defence research and engineering, a position created to monitor and analyse the work of that agency.

York gradually became concerned that the United States and the Soviet Union were developing more weapons yet becoming less secure and that the shortened response times to a pre-emptive nuclear strike would put nuclear decision making in the hands of low-level military officers or, ultimately, computers.

He spent the rest of his life as an anti-nuclear advocate. In the 1960s, he was an adviser to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. During the Carter administration, he was a delegate at the strategic arms talks with the Soviet Union in Geneva and chief United States negotiator in unsuccessful talks with the Soviet Union to impose a comprehensive nuclear test ban.

York spent the later years of his career teaching physics at the University of California, San Diego. He served as the university's chancellor from its founding in 1961 until 1964, and again from 1970 to 1972.

York maintained a lifelong interest in arms control. In 1983, he founded the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, an organisation, based at the university, that organised research and seminars on conflict resolution and promoted international efforts to avoid war.

In 1990, with Sanford Lakoff, he published A Shield in Space?: Technology, Politics and the Strategic Defense Initiative, a highly regarded analysis of President Ronald Reagan's proposed "Star Wars" missile defense system. In 1995, he published Arms and the Physicist.

In addition to his wife, Sybil, he is survived by three children and four grandchildren.