Physicist who became Jimmy Carter’s defence chief ‘understood… the technological complexities and unprecedented dangers of modern warfare’
Harold Brown, an advocate of nuclear arms control who as former president Jimmy Carter’s defence secretary tried but failed to win US Senate approval for a key treaty with the Soviet Union, has died at age 91, the think tank where he worked said.
Brown, from New York, was the first scientist to take the helm of the large and complex US military establishment. He was a physicist who received his bachelor’s degree at age 18 and his doctorate at 22. Brown spent his professional life initially developing nuclear weapons and then later trying to control them.
He died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, California, on Friday, according to the Santa Monica-based RAND Corporation, where Brown served on the board until his death.
“Harold Brown understood, perhaps better than any defence secretary before him, the technological complexities and unprecedented dangers of modern warfare,” RAND president and chief executive officer Michael Rich said. “He… made tremendous contributions to the advancement of science and the security of the nation.”
Brown became Pentagon chief in 1977 and left in 1981, deeply disappointed that he was unable to convince the Senate to back the nuclear arms limitation treaty reached with the Soviet Union in 1979 dubbed SALT II.
