You are cordially invited to a discussion on the topic of
A History of Nuclear Proliferation: Iran Today
with
Thomas C. Reed
Former Secretary of the Air Force
Former Director of the National Reconnaissance Office
Tuesday, February 9
1:00 PM
The Institute of World Politics
1521 16th Street NW
Washington, D.C.
Parking map
Thomas C. Reed was the Secretary of the Air Force during the Ford and Carter administrations. In the mid-Seventies, Reed became the youngest-ever director of the National Reconnaissance Office. In the Eighties, Reed served as Special Assistant to President Reagan for National Security Policy. Reed has a technical background in nuclear weapons design.
After earning a graduate degree from the University of Southern California, Reed moved to a position at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he designed two thermonuclear devices, both of which were fired over the Pacific in 1962.
Upon leaving Livermore, Reed started and ran a successful high-tech company making superconductors, now principally used in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners. In 1966 he became the Northern California chair of Ronald Reagan’s first gubernatorial race. Reed served as chief of personnel in the Governor’s first administration, and in 1970 he assumed full responsibility for Governor Reagan’s re-election as his statewide co-chair and campaign director. In 1973, Reed was recruited to manage certain intelligence projects at the Pentagon in connection with the Yom Kippur War. A decade of involvement in national security matters followed, culminating with a position on President Reagan’s National Security Council staff.
His first book, At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War– with an introduction by former President George H. W. Bush– was published in 2004. His second work, The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation, was co-authored by Danny Stillman, a former chief of technical intelligence at Los Alamos. Reed’s third non-fiction work,The Reagan Enigma, was released in 2014.