The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will award its John S. Foster Medal to Linton Brooks, who led the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration during the George W. Bush administration.
Brooks, a former submarine commander and arms-control ambassador, is only the fifth person to receive the award, which is named for the pioneering nuclear-weapon designer and fourth director at Livermore.
The former NNSA administrator accepted the award, to be presented in a ceremony this fall, with characteristic loquaciousness.
“I am humbled and flattered by the award of the John S. Foster Medal,” Brooks said in a prepared statement Aug. 22 from the California nuclear-weapon laboratory. “To be associated in any way with a living legend like Johnny Foster is a huge honor. To be cited for a set of characteristics that may or may not be an accurate description of me but are a perfect summary of my aspirations is humbling beyond words. And to have it come from a laboratory with which I have such a long association and for which I have such admiration is frosting on the cake. I thank the selection committee and the Laboratory for such a profound honor.”
The long-retired Foster, who is 97 this year, remains an occasional contributor to high-level nuclear weapons conversations in Washington and throughout the country. A staunch stockpile advocate, Foster publicly pressed for a return to explosive nuclear testing during Brooks’ time at the NNSA.
As recently as this year, a former government official and current think-tank blogger cited one of Foster’s presentations at the ExchangeMonitor’s2016 Nuclear Deterrence Summit to support an argument that Russia could be using very low-yield nuclear tests to assess the performance of its low-yield nuclear weapons.
Foster himself received the inaugural John S. Foster Medal in 2015, according to Livermore’s website.
Other Foster medal recipients are:
- Retired Air Force Gen. Larry Welch in 2016.
- Victor Reis, the Department of Energy’s former assistant secretary for defense programs, in 2017
- John Nuckolls, former Livermore director, in 2018.
