Ash Carter

Ashton Baldwin Carter (September 24, 1954 – October 24, 2022) was an American government official and academic who served as the 25th United States secretary of defense from February 2015 to January 2017.

He later served as director of the Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.

Carter began his career as a physicist.

After a brief experience as an analyst for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, he switched careers to public policy.

Ashton Baldwin Carter was born on September 24, 1954, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

His father is William Stanley Carter Jr., a World War II veteran, United States Navy neurologist and psychiatrist, and department chairman at Abington Memorial Hospital for 30 years.

His mother is Anne Baldwin Carter, an English teacher.

He has three siblings, including children's book author Cynthia DeFelice.

As a child he was nicknamed Ash and Stoobie.

Carter was raised in Abington, Pennsylvania, on Wheatsheaf Lane.

At age eleven, working at his first job at a Philadelphia car wash, he was fired for "wise-mouthing the owner."

Carter was educated at Highland Elementary School (class of 1966) and at Abington Senior High School (class of 1972) in Abington.

In high school, he was a wrestler, lacrosse player, cross-country runner, and president of the Honor Society.

Carter attended the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 1975.

His senior thesis, "Quarks, Charm and the Psi Particle", was published in Yale Scientific in 1975.

He was also an experimental research associate at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in 1975 (where he worked on quark research) and at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1976.

Carter then became a Rhodes Scholar and studied at the University of Oxford.

In 1976, Carter completed his Bachelor of Arts in his double-major of physics and medieval history at Yale College, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa.

He received his Doctor of Philosophy in theoretical physics on Hard processes in perturbative QCD in 1979 and was supervised by Christopher Llewellyn Smith.

He was a member of St John's College, Oxford.

Carter was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow research associate in theoretical physics at Rockefeller University from 1979 to 1980, studying time-reversal invariance and dynamical symmetry breaking.

He coauthored two papers on CP violations in B meson decays with A. I. Sanda, which were used as one of theoretical basis to build B factories.

Carter was then a research fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies from 1982 to 1984, during which time he wrote a public report assessing that the Reagan-proposed "Star Wars" initiative could not protect the U.S. from a Soviet nuclear attack.

He joined the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1984 and became chair of the International & Global Affairs faculty.

Carter taught at Harvard University, as an assistant professor from 1984 to 1986, associate professor from 1986 to 1988, professor and associate director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1988 to 1990, and director of the center from 1990 to 1993.

At the Kennedy School, he became chair of the International and Global Affairs faculty and Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs.

He concurrently was co-director of the Preventive Defense Project of Harvard and Stanford Universities.

He was inducted into Abington Senior High School's Hall of Fame in 1989.

Carter served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy during President Clinton's first term, from 1993 to 1996, responsible for policy regarding the former Soviet states, strategic affairs, and nuclear weapons.

From 1993 to 1996, Carter served as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy during President Bill Clinton's first term.

He was responsible for strategic affairs, including dealing with the threat of weapons of mass destruction elsewhere in the world, nuclear weapons policy (including overseeing the U.S. nuclear arsenal and missile defenses), the 1994 Nuclear Posture Review, the Agreed Framework signed in 1994 which froze North Korea's plutonium-producing nuclear reactor program, the 1995 extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the negotiation of the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, and the multibillion-dollar Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program and Project Sapphire that removed all nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.

Carter directed military planning during the 1994 crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

During President Obama's first term, he served first as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics and then Deputy Secretary of Defense until December 2013.

In February 2015, he replaced Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense and served until the end of the Obama administration.

During his tenure, he ended the ban of transgender officers in the military.

In 2016, Carter opened all military occupations and positions to women without exception.

This marked the first time in U.S. history that women with the appropriate qualifications would be allowed to serve in military roles such as infantry, armor, reconnaissance, and special operations units.

For his service to national security, Carter had on five occasions been awarded the DOD Distinguished Public Service Medal.

He had also received the CJCS Joint Distinguished Civilian Service Award, and the Defense Intelligence Medal for his contributions to intelligence.

Carter was author or co-author of eleven books and more than 100 articles on physics, technology, national security, and management.