New DTRA Director

Physicist Stephen Younger has left his position as senior associate laboratory director for national security at Los Alamos National Laboratory to become the new director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. DTRA is the agency charged with reducing the threat to the US from nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction. Younger was appointed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in early August and took over the leadership of DTRA on 1 September.

Younger, who holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Maryland, College Park, has spent most of his career working with various aspects of nuclear weapons design. After a stint at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST), where he worked in atomic physics, he joined the nuclear design department of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1982. While there, he led design groups for the nuclear-driven x-ray laser and other nuclear explosive concepts.

Younger moved to Los Alamos in 1989 and led programs in inertial confinement fusion, and “was responsible for the largest operational unit at the laboratory, the nuclear weapons directorate, during a period of significant change and enormous challenge,” said lab director John Browne. Younger told his Los Alamos colleagues that he was “looking forward to the challenge of leading the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. This move continues a career commitment to reducing the dangers to the United States and our allies from weapons of mass destruction.”