Theodore B. Taylor

Theodore Brewster Taylor (Ted Taylor) (born July 11, 1925 in Mexico City , † October 28, 2004 in Silver Spring , Maryland ) was an American physicist.

He came from a family of missionaries and his father was the leader of the Young Men’s Christian Association ( YMCA ) in Mexico City . Even as a boy he experimented intensively with a chemistry set . In 1945 he made his bachelor's degree at the California Institute of Technology , where he then worked on his doctorate. After failing the doctoral examination due to a lack of concentration (he later received his doctorate after his service with the Navy at Cornell University ), he went to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1949 and became the best designer for nuclear weapons. He reduced the initially heavy bombs of the Manhattan Project to miniature sizes . So he built the types Scorpion, Wasp, Bee and Hornet. The W9 artillery shell he developed had the explosive power of the (4.5 t) Hiroshima bomb at less than a tenth (364 kilograms) its weight. The smallest tactical nuclear weapon in the US arsenal also came from him, the Davy Crockett could develop up to 1 kt of explosive power over three stages and weighed only around 23 kilograms.

But he also built the largest fission bomb ever detonated by the USA (Super Oralloy). From 1956 he worked on Project Orion , the plan for an atomic bomb-powered interplanetary spaceship. At the same time he developed a compact, safer nuclear reactor ( TRIGA ) for General Atomics . After the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1963 had banned the explosion of atomic bombs in space, he took over the supervision of the US nuclear weapons depot at the Defense Atomic Support Agency from 1964 to 1966 .

Here he understood the possible destructive potential of nuclear weapons and with this insight he became, in his own words, a nuclear dropout . He joined the consulting firm International Research and Development Corporation in 1967 and later founded the Nova company, which investigated alternatives to nuclear energy. McPhee's book The Curve of Binding Energy , published in 1974, is largely a portrait of Taylor and emerged from interviews with him. There he describes - sometimes in great detail - the ease with which skilled terrorists could build a nuclear weapon with publicly accessible knowledge and access to fissile material. He lectured and wrote books on the risks of nuclear energy and the dangers of nuclear terrorism. As early as 1983 he warned:

"Sooner or later a terrorist group or a psychopath will build a nuclear weapon"

Taylor later accepted a teaching position at Princeton University and was also a member of the commission investigating the Three Mile Island nuclear accident . His further pursuit was "to put the spirit back in the bottle".

From 1948 until his divorce in 1992, he was married and had 5 children.

literature

• John McPhee The Curve of Binding Energy , 1974

Web links

• Obituary in Guardian 2004