John Foster, Lawrence Livermore’s fourth director, has died at 102

Former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory director John Foster died on April 25 at the age of 102, the lab announced Tuesday.

Foster served as Lawrence Livermore’s fourth director from 1961-65, before becoming director of Defense Research and Engineering at the Department of Defense from 1965-1973, under four defense secretaries and two presidents. However, his career began in World War II, when in 1942 he did research at Harvard’s Radio Research Laboratory. He was advising the U.S. Army Air Corp in Italy and reverse-engineering German radar to mitigate bomber casualties by the age of 21. 

Foster completed his bachelor’s degree at McGill University with honors in 1948. He married Barbara Anne Boyd Wickes there, who joined him on a cross-continent motorcycle journey in 1952 from Montreal to Berkeley, Calif., when Ernest Lawrence, founder of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recruited Foster to join Lawrence’s University of California Radiation Laboratory. 

Foster then, after completing his doctorate in physics at University of California Berkeley, was one of a select few recruits to join the newly established Livermore branch that would eventually become Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He led the team on the weapons effort, from the first successful detonation test at the Nevada Test Site in 1955 to other compact warhead designs during the Cold War.

Foster’s achievements at the lab led to an award, the John S. Foster, Jr. Medal, to be named after him. Foster was the first recipient in 2015, when Lawrence Livermore National Security inaugurated the award. The annual Foster award has had nine recipients so far, and honors nuclear security and military strategy professionals with a $25,000 cash reward. 

“Johnny Foster was a tremendous technical innovator, creative thinker on defense issues and tireless advocate for the power of science and technology to advance national security,” Kim Budil, the lab’s current director, said in the lab’s obituary.