Harold Brown, an advocate of nuclear arms control who as President Jimmy Carter\u2019s Defence Secretary tried but failed to win US Senate approval of a key treaty with the Soviet Union, has died at age 91, the think tank where he worked said.<\/p>\n
Brown, a native New Yorker, was the first scientist to take the helm of the large and complex US military establishment. He was a physicist who received his bachelor\u2019s degree at age 18 and his doctorate at 22. Brown spent his professional life initially developing nuclear weapons and then later striving to control them.<\/p>\n
\u201cBrown understood, perhaps better than any Defence Secretary before him, the technological complexities and unprecedented dangers of modern warfare,\u201d RAND president and chief executive officer Michael D Rich said. \u201cHe was also an educator and author who made tremendous contributions to the advancement of science and the security of the nation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe world is a dangerous place. But it has always been a dangerous place,\u201d Brown told The Washington Post in 1980. \u201cAll we\u2019re offered is a reasonable change to make things work. Because I\u2019m temperamentally an optimist, I believe that\u2019s good enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brown became Pentagon chief in 1977 and left in 1981, disappointed that was unable to convince the Senate to back the nuclear arms limitation treaty reached with the Soviet Union in 1979 dubbed SALT II. As Defence Secretary, he also was involved in planning the botched US military mission to rescue American hostages held in Iran that ended with the deaths of eight US service members in April 1980 and the diminishment of US prestige.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Harold Brown, an advocate of nuclear arms control who as President Jimmy Carter\u2019s Defence Secretary tried but failed to win US Senate approval of a key treaty with the Soviet Union, has died at age 91, the think tank where he worked said. Brown, a native New Yorker, was the first scientist to take the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51997,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51996"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51998,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51996\/revisions\/51998"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}