Roger Batzel; Livermore Lab Director for 17 Years

Roger Batzel, 78, longest serving director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. An Idaho native, Batzel was an Air Force navigator during World War II before studying chemical engineering at the University of Idaho. He later studied for his doctorate under Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg at UC Berkeley in 1951. Two years later he joined Livermore, a national laboratory managed by the UC system. He rose to director in 1971 and served for the next 17 years, a period of major growth for the weapons research institute. During Batzel’s tenure, the lab’s work force expanded from 5,400 to 8,000 employees and its budget rose from $128 million to $815 million in 1988. As director, Batzel certified to the president that the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile was functional and often testified before Congress about weapons systems. He came under fire at the end of his tenure from critics who charged that the lab oversold some developing weapons systems, including the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as Star Wars. The lab’s head of weapons research, Roy D. Woodruff, quit in 1987 after Batzel refused to intervene when physicist Edward Teller gave President Reagan what Woodruff considered an exaggerated assessment of the progress of the Star Wars technology. Batzel was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science. He received a distinguished associate award from the Department of Energy. On Saturday at a hospital in San Ramon, Calif., five days after suffering a massive heart attack.