Portal:University of Oxford/Selected biography/70

James McCormack (1910–1975) was a United States Army officer and the first Director of Military Applications of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, McCormack also studied at Hertford College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After service in World War II, he was chosen in 1947 as the Director of Military Applications of the Atomic Energy Commission. He took a pragmatic approach to handling the issue of the proper agency to hold custody of the nuclear weapons stockpile, and supported Edward Teller's development of thermonuclear weapons. He was appointed Director of Nuclear Applications at the Air Research and Development Center in 1952, later becoming Deputy Commander of the Air Research and Development Command. After retiring from the military in 1955, McCormack became the first head of the Institute for Defense Analysis, a non-profit research organization. In 1958 he became vice president for industrial and governmental relations at MIT, and originated a proposal for a new space agency, which eventually became NASA.