William Flynn Martin (born October 4, 1950) is an American energy economist, educator, and international diplomat. Martin served as Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan for National Security Affairs, Executive Secretary of the United States National Security Council, and United States Deputy Secretary of Energy during the Ronald Reagan Administration. He was President of the Council of the University for Peace, appointed to the Council by Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan. In 1992, he was Executive Director of the Republican Platform committee under George H. W. Bush. William Martin served for ten years (from 2000 to 2010) as Chairman of the Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Martin was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He achieved his Bachelor of Science from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and his Master of Science from MIT in 1974. His master's thesis was the basis of an article he co-authored with George Cabot Lodge in the March, 1975 Harvard Business Review entitled Our Society in 1985: Business May Not Like It. William Martin is the recipient of seven letters of merit from Ronald Reagan, received the Order of the Rising Sun in person from Emperor Akihito of Japan, and was commended by Czech President Vaclav Havel for significant contributions to the Czech Republic.In 2023 he received the Distinguished Contribution to Diplomacy Medal of the Czech Republic. Martin received the highest honor of the Department of Energy for contributions in the fields of energy security and science and technology including fathering both the human genome project (1986) and international thermonuclear experimental reactor - ITER (1985). Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette honored Martin’s contributions thirty five year service to the Department of Energy in 2019. Martin’s perspectives on President Reagan are summarized in a book Reflections on President Reagan and an oral history video. His lifelong experiences with Japan are included in US-Japan Relations and Energy Security (1970-2100). William F. Martin’s publications have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Harvard International Review, MIT Technology Review, and the Wall Street Journal. He has authored several books on energy, environment, and national security through MIT Press (two books), McGraw-Hill, Trilateral Commission, United States Department of Energy, and the International Energy Agency. His books have been published in Japanese, German, and French. William F. Martin’s official White House government National Security Council files are available in the Ronald Reagan Library archive
Education and early career William Martin received his BS in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1972. He immediately entered MIT for a Master’s degree. His MIT advisor was Professor Carroll L. Wilson, the first general manager of the Atomic Energy Commission. Martin had private studies with two Nobel Prize winners in Economics: Professor Paul Samuelson and Professor Robert Solow. The focus with Professor Solow was in the economics of externalities — to study how non economic factors such as environmental degradation should be accounted in free market economic systems. His thesis advisors were MIT Professor Carroll L. Wilson and Professor George Cabot Lodge of Harvard. As a graduate student at MIT, he was part of a team that prepared ten days of Congressional hearings chaired by Congressman John Dingell on Growth and Its Implications for the Future (Roundtable Press, 1973). The hearings were in response to the Club of Rome's report, The Limits to Growth and were aimed at providing the first Congressional hearings on the world economic, energy and environmental outlook and the need for sustainable growth strategies. He was also part of an MIT engineering group that produced a volume for the United Nations Environmental Program on resource materials for studies in environmental management. He is co-author of the report, Professional Materials for Environmental Management Education (MIT Press, 1975). These publications were induced by the first United Nations conference on the environment held in Stockholm in 1972 and headed by Maurice Strong who said of Growth and Its Implications for the Future, "This small volume summarizes much of the important work going on today with regard to global survival...I know of no other publication to date which emphasizes more systematically or extensively, and in such readable form, the interacting relationships amongst diverse fields." Following graduating from MIT, Martin joined the MIT Energy Laboratory as a Program officer for the Workshop on Alternative Energy Strategies (WAES) headed by Professor Carroll L. Wilson, the first General Manager of the US Atomic Energy Commission. This fifteen country energy assessment group, headquartered at MIT, met for three years and produced the report, Energy: Global Energy Prospects 1985-2000 (McGraw-Hill, 1975). Martin was a co-author of the final report and editor of Energy Supply to the Year 2000 (MIT Press, 1977). Martin was responsible for energy supply analysis as well as energy projections of developing nations. He and his co-author Frank J.P. Pinto were responsible for using the SIMLINK model of the World Bank as an economic foundation for projecting energy futures for developing nations. This World Bank-MIT project entitled Energy and Economic Growth Prospects for the Developing Countries: 1960-2000 (MIT Press, 1977). was one of the pioneering research attempts to estimate energy prospects for developing countries.
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