Harold Brown (September 19, 1927 – January 4, 2019) was an American nuclear physicist who served as United States Secretary of Defense from 1977 to 1981, under President Jimmy Carter. Previously, in the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations, he held the posts of Director of Defense Research and Engineering (1961–1965) and United States Secretary of the Air Force (1965–1969). A child prodigy, Brown graduated from the Bronx High School of Science at age 15, and earned a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University at age 21. As Secretary of Defense, he set the groundwork for the Camp David Accords, took part in strategic arms negotiations with the Soviet Union, and supported, unsuccessfully, ratification of the SALT II treaty.
Early life and career Brown was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Abraham, a lawyer who had fought in World War I, and Gertrude (Cohen) Brown, a diamond merchant's bookkeeper. His parents were secular Jews and strong supporters of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. From a very young age Brown was drawn to mathematics and physics; he enrolled as a student at the Bronx High School of Science, from which he graduated at age 15 with a grade average of 99.5. He then immediately entered Columbia University, earning an A.B. summa cum laude at 17 years of age, as well as the Green Memorial Prize for the best academic record. He continued as a graduate student at Columbia, and was awarded a Ph.D. in physics in 1949 when he was 21. After a short period of teaching and postdoctoral research, Brown became a research scientist at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he played a role in the construction of the Polaris missile and the development of plutonium. In 1952, he joined the staff of the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Livermore and became its director in 1960, succeeding Edward Teller, of whom he was a protégé. At Livermore, Brown led a team of six other physicists, all older than he was, who used some of the first computers, along with mathematics and engineering, to reduce the size of thermonuclear warheads for strategic military use. Brown and his team helped make Livermore's reputation by designing nuclear warheads small and light enough to be placed on the Navy's nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs). During the 1950s he served as a member of, or consultant to, several federal scientific bodies and as senior science adviser at the 1958-1959 Conference on the Discontinuance of Nuclear Tests. Brown worked under United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as Director of Defense Research and Engineering from 1961 to 1965, and then as United States Secretary of the Air Force from October 1965 to February 1969, first under McNamara and then under Clark Clifford. From 1969 to 1977, he was President of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
U.S. Secretary of Defense
Appointment and initial agenda
Although Brown had accumulated almost eight years of prior service in the Pentagon, he was the first natural scientist to become secretary of defense. He involved himself in practically all areas of departmental activity. Consistent with the Carter administration's objective to reorganize the federal government, Brown launched a comprehensive review of defense organization that eventually brought significant change. But he understood the limits to effective reform. In one of his first speeches after leaving office, "'Managing' the Defense Department-Why It Can't Be Done," at the University of Michigan in March 1981, he observed:... I want to note again the basic limitation of any attempt to manage the Defense Department in an idealized textbook fashion. The pull of the need to be able to fight a war, if necessary, will always limit the peacetime efficiency of the defense establishment. ... The pull of conflicting domestic interests represents democratic government. ... To manage defense efficiently and at the lowest possible cost along presumed business lines of management and organization is a useful standard. But there are prices we cannot afford to pay for meeting it exactly. One is the abandonment of democratic control. Another is the loss of a war. Defense cannot be "managed" like a business. But it can be led so as to preserve most effectively our national security interests.With regard to strategic planning, Brown shared much the same concerns as his Republican predecessors—the need to upgrade U.S. military forces and improve collective security arrangements—but with a stronger commitment to arms control. Brown adhered to the principle of "essential equivalence" in the nuclear competition with the Soviet Union. This meant that "Soviet strategic nuclear forces do not become usable instruments of political leverage, diplomatic coercion, or military advantage; nuclear stability, especially in a crisis, is maintained; any advantages in force characteristics enjoyed by the Soviets are offset by U.S. advantages in other characteristics; and the U.S. posture is not in fact, and is not seen as, inferior in performance to the strategic nuclear forces of the Soviet Union." His later writings in his 2012 memoir, Star-Spangled Security, reinforced this agenda:When I became secretary of defense in 1977, the military services, most of all the army, were disrupted badly by the Vietnam War. There was general agreement that the Soviet Union outclassed the West in conventional military capability, especially in ground forces in Europe.According to The New York Times, experts say in retrospect that contrary to a popular narrative which asserts that President Ronald Reagan increased defense spending to ramp up competition with (and ultimately bankrupting) the Soviet Union, it was Carter and Brown who began "maintaining the strategic balance, countering Soviet aircraft and ballistic innovations by improving land-based ICBMs, by upgrading B-52 strategic bombers with low-flying cruise missiles and by deploying far more submarine-launched missiles tipped with MIRVs, or multiple warheads that split into independent trajectories to hit many targets".
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