Charles McMillan, 69, the former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, died Friday morning, Sept. 6, in a car crash in New Mexico, people familiar with the situation told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory acknowledged McMillan’s passing Friday in a statement posted to the social media sites LinkedIn and Facebook.
“On behalf of the entire Laboratory, I would like to express deepest sympathies to the McMillan family and to the many current and former employees who worked closely with Charlie and knew him well,” current Los Alamos lab Director Thom Mason wrote in the statement.
Local authorities who responded to the crash have not confirmed the identity of the victim, but the Los Alamos Police Department said one victim was pronounced dead at the Los Alamos Medical Center, about four miles from the site of the head-on crash. A 22 year-old woman was also treated for minor injuries, the police department wrote Friday in a statement.
There were two vehicles involved in the accident near the Los Alamos County Office, close to the city’s main thoroughfare, state route 502, according to the Friday press release from the Los Alamos Police Department. The crash happened around 5:00 a.m. Mountain time, or about 7:00 a.m. Eastern time, according to the release.
“The accident and cause are still under investigation by LAPD’s crash team,” the local police department wrote in the release.
People who answered phones at the Los Alamos police and fire departments on Friday did not identify the crash victims.
McMillan worked at Los Alamos, the world’s first nuclear weapons lab, for more than 18 years. He was director for more than six-and-a-half of those years and retired in 2017. Prior to that he spent 18 years at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos’ competitor weapons lab in California.
On his LinkedIn profile, McMillan wrote that he was the project leader for the W80, an air-launched, nuclear cruise-missile warhead still in use today.
McMillan was a PhD physicist with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In a statement Friday, New Mexico’s senior U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said McMillan’s “tragic passing today is a loss to Los Alamos and the entire scientific community.”
Fellow U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said in a statement posted to the website X that he was “heartbroken by the loss of such a great man and colleague.”
Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), whose first New Mexico district includes the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, said in a statement on X that McMillan will be “deeply missed.”
Dan Leone and Sarah Salem contributed to this report from Washington.