http://www.lamonitor.com/content/man-behind-standoff...Morse, 75, is a retired physicist. He began his career at Los Alamos National Laboratory as head of the advanced concepts group at TD-8 and simultaneously the laser fusion group at T-6 in 1965. “I was aware of Richard Morse’s work and while it was controversial, it was considered brilliant,” LANL physicist Morrie Pongratz said. “He certainly was a pioneer in plasma physics.” Morse said that T-6 started developing the mathematical basis for understanding the thin case problems of the W-76 thermonuclear warhead, an issue that seems to have eaten away at him for the last three decades. Work continued on the W-76 while Morse and others traveled between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, LANL and the universities of Arizona, Rochester and MIT in the late ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s, he said. “Our work was still being used in one of the endless sequence of studies of the thin case problems when I came back to Los Alamos in 1996,” Morse has said in previous interviews.
He recalled his work as a LANL technical staff member in 1965, as deputy group leader in the magnetic confinement fusion theory group and later as group leader in the laser fusion/ICF group through 1975. Morse was fired in 1976, he said, by LANL Director Harold Agnew, rehired by Director Don Kerr and fired by Director Siegfried Hecker. “From the very beginning of the case’s concept, I argued, often aggressively with lab hierarchy, that it was too thin,” Morse said. He recalled leaving LANL and working as a professor of applied mathematics, physics, biochemistry and nuclear engineering from 1976-1992 at the University of Arizona at Tucson. From 1985-1989, Morse took partial leave to return to LANL to work in group X-1, he said, and returned again from 1996-1997, employed by the Above Ground Experiments program, to assist with the W-76 project...
Morse described his colorful educational background. He was expelled from Flintridge Preparatory School in Pasadena, Calif., he said, during the last week of sophomore classes for having a 25-pound sack of blasting powder and a coil of fuse in his gym locker. “I had just bought the stuff from a powder magazine in the Mojave Desert to take home for the summer,” Morse said. He ultimately earned his high school diploma at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., in 1953 and went on to Cal Tech, where Richard Feynman was his advisor, he said. At Cal Tech, Morse said he was freshman class president, student body vice president, fraternity house vice president and ski club president, and he participated in rock climbing, track and freshman and varsity football.
Morse also attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and spent a brief period at Berkeley. “I was expelled from Berkeley for putting a pennant on top of the Campanile, a challenging night-time rock-climbing activity,” he said. “When applying later for admission to graduate school at what is now the University of California at San Diego, a computer detected my Social Security number and demanded that I apply for re-admission to the UC system. My thesis advisor-to-be, Marshall Rosenbluth, retaliated by petitioning UC for a certificate attesting that I had been ‘thrown out of Berkeley’ when no offense seemed sufficient.” Morse said he earned his Ph.D. in physics from UCSD in 1965. “The subject of my thesis was on certain aspects of high beta plasma confinement,” he said. Morse served on the National Academy of Sciences Advisory Committee on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and was the coordinator for exchanges on dense plasmas with the Soviet Academy of Sciences and subsequently for the National Science Foundation with the Russian Academy, he said...
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