Harold Palmer Smith, Jr., IGS Distinguished Scholar in Residence, who led the effort to dismantle Soviet and American nuclear and chemical weapons, died Friday August 1. He was 89 years old.
Dr. Smith is best known for his leadership as the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration where he implemented the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program to dismantle the nuclear, chemical, and biological arsenals of the former Soviet Union in accordance with the strategic arms treaties then in effect. This work was especially satisfying to him because he had led innumerable studies during the Cold War for the Defense Science Board, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, the Committee on Undersea Warfare of the National Academy of Science, and the House and Senate Armed Service Committees. The overriding goal of all of these was to ensure that the American nuclear deterrent remained viable in the face of real and possible developments and actions by the (then) Soviet Union. The contrast between those studies of an avowed, existential enemy and then working cooperatively with that same enemy to reduce or eliminate the threat would have been difficult to imagine in the early days of the Cold War.
Dr. Smith was born on November 30, 1935 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to Anne Blanche (Trost) Smith and Harold Palmer Smith. He attended public schools in the suburbs of Pittsburgh where his student leadership and academic excellence won him a Sloan National Scholarship to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He graduated in 1957 with a degree in mechanical engineering. That same year, he was awarded a Nuclear Technology Fellowship by the Atomic Energy Commission to study nuclear engineering at MIT. He received the PhD in 1960 where his doctoral thesis studied the “Dynamics and Control of Nuclear Rocket Engines.” He was, indeed, “a rocket scientist.” He then accepted a position at the University of California (Berkeley) as an Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering.
He served as a First Lieutenant in the United States Army in 1961-1962, where he established a program at the Ballistic Research Laboratory to apply the newly invented laser to military programs. At the same time, he rose in the ranks at Berkeley and became a tenured professor in 1966. His diverse research included the dynamics of nuclear reactor systems, where he solved and demonstrated the optimal control of the “xenon poisoning problem” that had tormented scientists during the Manhattan Project. He also published an extensive series of articles on the hydrodynamics of fissioning gases and on the interaction of radiation with matter.
During his first sabbatical year in 1966, he was awarded a White House Fellowship where he served as an aide to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and conducted studies for John Foster, Director of Defense Research and Engineering, then the third most powerful position in the Pentagon, and for Harold Brown, Secretary of the Air Force. At the end of the fellowship, Dr. Foster assigned him to the Vulnerability Task Force of the Defense Science Board, launching Dr. Smith on his studies of Soviet military and intelligence capabilities. Two years later he became Chairman of the task force.
At the invitation in 1969 of Edward Teller, he agreed to chair the University of California (Davis) Department of Applied Science located adjacent to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In this capacity, he was promoted to full Professor in 1970. His leaves of absence from UCD allowed him to respond to issues of national importance. The Rand Corporation asked him to “marshal the facts” related to the upheaval at Rand as a result of the publication of the “Pentagon Papers.” Congressman Timothy Wirth (D-CO), supported by the AEC, asked him to study the ramifications of closing the Rocky Flats plant, which manufactured plutonium parts for nuclear weapons. The Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger asked him to study the vulnerability of the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) to long-range Soviet electronic jamming. As a result of his work, Rand was reorganized, the Rocky Flats Plant was closed, and key electronic changes were made in the AWACS.
In 1975 he retired from the University of California and formed a consulting company, The Palmer Smith Corporation (PSC), which allowed him to respond to the many requests for his advice. PSC was retained over the years by major aerospace and electronics corporations, including Boeing, Lockheed, and Grumman, as well as SAIC, now a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
All of these activities led in 1993 to a critical appointment as Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological programs, in the newly elected Clinton Administration. He was responsible for the security, reliability and reduction of the American and NATO arsenals of nuclear weapons, just as the Administration unexpectedly signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, ending the nuclear testing program that had been deemed essential to his tasks. Without the ability to test, fulfillment of these requirements required technical and diplomatic cooperation among the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy and their equivalent organizations in the United Kingdom and France.
Most satisfying of all was implementation of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. Working with his Russian counterparts, they removed missiles from silos on the windswept steppes of Ukraine; converted those missile fields to sunflower farms; transported nuclear weapons safely from Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus to newly constructed and secure facilities in Russia; removed the missile sections from ballistic missile submarines harbored at Severodvinsk near the Arctic Circle; guillotined strategic bombers at airbases in the Russian heartland; built a plant beyond the Urals to begin the destruction of forty thousand tons of chemical weapons; dismantled an anthrax production plant in Kazakhstan, awarded contracts with Vladimir Putin, (then) Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, to convert military factories to commercial enterprises; and probably the most amazing of all, formed true and lasting friendships with Russian colleagues. Those days are gone, but the memories remained and were cherished.
He took personal leadership of the program to dismantle the thirty thousand tons of American chemical weapons and to manage the related implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, an international treaty to prohibit the development and use of chemical weapons. He was responsible for oversight of the chemical and biological research programs to ensure that the US could immediately respond to crises and that the military could perform its missions in contaminated areas. He was also assigned responsibility for the management of defensive and offensive counter-proliferation and counter-terrorism, which required the very rewarding task of working with the Special Operations Command.
In his position he had the benefit of two talented agencies that reported directly to him: the Defense Special Weapons Agency and the On Site Inspection Agency. He expanded the missions of both to meet the new demands. The former has become the center for nuclear expertise and counter-terrorism in the Department of Defense while the latter has set international standards in arms control monitoring through inspection, reduction, liaison and escort, for various regimes. They have since been combined into a single agency, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).
Satisfied that he had fulfilled his responsibilities to the Administration, he returned to private life in 1998, re initiated some aspects of his consulting practice, and accepted an appointment at UC Berkeley as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence where he directed a series of well-funded, interdisciplinary studies related to nuclear terrorism. In 2009, he created the Harold Smith Seminar Series on Defense Policy, to which he invited various experts on military and policy issues to give public lectures and discuss subjects related to national security. The Series was well received throughout the Berkeley Community.
A Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Commander in the French Legion of Honor, he received the highest honors granted by the Department of Defense for civilian service, the Distinguished Public Service Award, as well as awards by the Military Services and Defense Agencies. In addition to technical papers, he published articles of public interest related to national security in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, US News and World Report, and Arms Control Today.
A long-time active member of Claremont Country Club, he was a competitive athlete his entire life, playing football, basketball, and softball in high school, basketball in college, squash in graduate school and tennis as a member of the Berkeley Tennis Club and the Claremont Country Club.
An oral history of his career may be found in the Bancroft Library Oral History Center; see https://ucblib.link/OHC HaroldPalmerSmithJr
Harold is predeceased by his wife of 64 years, Marian Bamford Smith. He is survived by his sister, Norma (Eric) Pepper of Austin, Texas; daughters, Natalya Marie Smith of La Jolla and Erika Bamford Smith of Oakland, and son Harold P. (Peter) Smith of Oakland; grandchildren, Andrew Latham Smith of Oakland, Harold Xavier Gonzalez of Stanford, and Natasha Mariana Gonzalez of San Francisco; and great grandchild Hayden Bamford Smith of Oakland.
Donations in Harold’s memory can be made to the Oak Tree Foundation, Federal Tax ID: 20-5250916 c/o Claremont Country Club, 5295 Broadway Terrace, Oakland, CA 94618. The Oak Tree Foundation is a tax-exempt non-profit organization with the mission to provide a financial safety net and educational support for Claremont Country Club employees and their immediate families.