Younger Leaves DTRA

In March, Stephen Younger resigned as director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to return to Los Alamos National Laboratory. US Air Force Major General Trudy H. Clark is acting director of the Fort Belvoir, Virginia-based agency until the Department of Defense finds a replacement.

The DTRA, where Younger had worked for two and a half years, was formed six years ago from various units within the DOD (see Physics Today, February 2003, page 23 ). Younger integrated those units and built the DTRA into a combat support agency, says Dale Klein, assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs.

Back at Los Alamos, Younger is working on computer simulations of societal behavior, especially as it relates to terrorism and war. “I believe that the frontier of national security studies is moving from the physical sciences to the social sciences,” he says. “Sociology is hard. In physics, you know what to measure, and it’s hard to measure. In the social sciences, it’s not clear what you’re measuring or how to measure it. But on the other hand, we have got to get a better understanding of why people do what they do.”

Younger is also spending time working on international security issues at the Washington, DC-based Woodrow Wilson Center, a nonpartisan policy research institute.