With the passage of another Cold War “whiz kid” whose youthful technological prodigy was sacrificed on the altar of nuclear supremacy, historians are left to contemplate why. Harold Brown’s mentor, Edward Teller, epitomized the clinical paranoia that ruled the era, so much so that Teller became unemployable in the government he relentlessly militarized. By contrast, Brown remained acceptable in polite Washington company, perhaps because he lacked the H-bomb father’s vampirish Hungarian accent. (Too, he had an enjoyable sense of humor, as when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April 1987 that Sen. Pete Wilson’s views on certain Star Wars issues “may win a Nobel prize–not in physics, but in perverse literature.”) But Brown’s legacy of world-destroying weapons, including the grotesque MX ICBM, is testament to how thoroughly he nonetheless embodied Teller’s mindset. A seemingly immortal relic of the catastrophe that was World War II is the industrial and political constituency that continues to laud America’s myriad Harold Browns as saviors of democracy. But they can and will justify anything, especially any raid on the nation’s treasury, in the name of defense against whatever goes bump in the night. Harold Brown, like so many of his fellow whizzes, should be mourned as a mind wasted on an obsession that was and still is a national disaster.
He was, to boot, a longtime director of the tobacco giants Altria and Philip Morris.
