The Nuclear Enterprise

Sidney David Drell was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey on September 13, 1926. He received a bachelor's degree in physics in 1946 from Princeton University and a master's degree in physics in 1947 and a doctorate in physics in 1949 from the University of Illinois. After teaching at Stanford University for two years, he joined the physics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He left in 1956 to work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He was the deputy director there for almost 30 years.

He was one of the top advisers to the United States government on military technology and arms control. He received the Enrico Fermi Award for his life's work in 2000 and the National Medal of Science for his contributions to physics and his service to the government in 2013. He wrote numerous books during his lifetime including Electromagnetic Structure of Nucleons, Facing the Threat of Nuclear Weapons, The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: A Technical, Political and Arms Control Assessment, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Physics and Arms Control, and The Gravest Danger: Nuclear Weapons. He co-wrote several textbooks with the theoretical physicist James D. Bjorken including Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and Relativistic Quantum Fields. He died on December 21, 2016 at the age of 90.

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