Dodd Starbird

Dodd Starbird attended the US Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1933. He then obtained a masters’ degree in civil engineering from Princeton and then attended the Army Engineer School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, graduating in 1938. At the 1936 Olympics Starbird finished the modern pentathlon despite running the cross-country with a broken metatarsal bone in his foot, and he left Berlin in a plaster cast. He became a career military officer, retiring from the Army in 1971 as a lieutenant general. In World War II Starbird was a strategic planner in the Operations Division of the War Department. He participated in Allied landings at Oran and Normandy, and commanded the 1135th Engineer Combat Unit, which was the first Allied unit to cross the Rhine.

After World War II, Starbird was involved in directing the US nuclear weapons program. In 1949 he helped with the planning of the nuclear tests at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific, site of the first hydrogen bomb explosion in 1952. In 1955 General Starbird was named director of the Division of Military Applications in the Atomic Energy Commission, the forerunner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and held the assignment until 1961. He later directed the Defense Communications Agency from 1962-67. After military retirement in 1971 he held several civilian posts in the government. In 1975 President Ford named him Assistant Administrator of the National Security and Energy Research and Development Administration. In 1977 President Carter appointed him to be the Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense Programs at the newly formed Department of Energy.