Lewis Strauss

Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss was an American government official, businessman and naval officer who became one of the most influential early administrators of United States nuclear power policy. He was a founding member of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946 and served as its chairman from 1953 to 1958, a period in which he championed the peacetime development of atomic energy and predicted that nuclear power would one day make electricity too cheap to meter. Strauss also pushed for the development of the hydrogen bomb during his time on the commission. His tenure was also marked by his leading role in the 1954 revocation of J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance, a controversial episode in the history of American nuclear policy.