Ted Taylor (physicist)

For other people named Theodore Taylor, see Theodore Taylor.

Theodore Brewster Taylor (July 11, 1925–October 28, 2004), was a prominent U.S. physicist and nuclear weapons designer.

He was born in Mexico City, Mexico, the son of a daughter of a congregationalist missionary and a director of the YMCA. He spent much of his childhood in Cuernavaca, in Morelos state, south of Mexico City. From 1943 to 1946 he served on active duty in the US Navy. He received a PhD from Cornell University in 1954.

From 1948 to 1956 he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he gained some fame as a designer of small, efficient nuclear weapons. In 1956 he moved to General Atomics, where he directed Project Orion, with his friend Lew Allen as contract manager. He also was involved in the design of small nuclear reactors to produce radioactive isotopes for medical use, the TRIGA reactors. He led the team that designed the largest pure fission bomb ever detonated, the Super Oralloy Bomb ("SOB"), which had a yield of 500 kilotons in its only test (Ivy King).

After the end of Project Orion, he worked for the Defense Atomic Support Agency, involved with controlling the US stockpile of nuclear weapons. Beginning in 1966 he advocated nuclear disarmament, and worked as a consultant to the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1966 to 1968 evaluating the International Atomic Energy Agency in regard to nuclear non-proliferation. He worked as a visiting professor at University of California, Santa Cruz and Princeton University; in addition to nuclear proliferation, a topic on which he wrote several books, he studied renewable energy and energy conservation.

Taylor was a member of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and attended several of its meetings during the 1980s.

As of 2001, he was retired in Wellsville, New York. He died on October 282004 of coronary artery disease.

Further reading

• John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy, Ballantine, 1973, 1974. ISBN 0-345-28000-8, This book about proliferation is largely an account of Taylor's ideas, including his idea that it is "easy" for rogue actors to produce nuclear bombs.
• George Dyson, Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship, Henry Holt and Company, 2002. ISBN 0-8050-5985-7
• Mason Willrich, Ted Taylor, Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards: A Report to the Energy Policy Project of the Ford Foundation, Ballinger, 1974, ISBN 0-88410-208-4
• Taylor, Theodore B., Humpstone, Charles C., The Restoration of the Earth, Harper and Row, 1973, ISBN 0-88410-208-4
• Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons, an anti-proliferation essay by Taylor (1996)