Stephen Lukasik, physicist turned research director, dies

Stephen Lukasik, a physicist who sought to apply advanced technology to national security, overseeing Defense Department research on computer networking, artificial intelligence and the detection of nuclear explosions before becoming a prescient expert on cybersecurity, died Oct. 3 at his home in Falls Church, Va. He was 88.

The cause was respiratory failure, said his wife, Virginia Dogan Lukasik.

Lukasik was 14 when he decided to become a physicist, haunted by newspaper accounts of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, that ended World War II. If science had enabled humans to harness the power of nuclear fission and fusion, he decided, it could also help forestall future destruction.

Working with many others in his field, he helped develop methods to detect — and hopefully deter — nuclear explosions around the world, resulting in verification systems that proved crucial to agreements such as the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, signed by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1974.

Through his work in the 1970s and ’80s at the Defense Department and the Federal Communications Commission, Lukasik also became a Zeligesque figure in the development of digital technologies. As the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, now known as DARPA, he backed the growth of ARPANET, an influential precursor to the Internet. And as chief scientist at the FCC, he helped commercialize spread-spectrum techniques, which were used for intelligence communications before becoming a cornerstone of WiFi and Bluetooth technologies.

A man of wide-ranging interests, Lukasik amassed a collection of about 15,000 books on subjects including national security, shipwrecks, archaeology and geology, and participated in a 1988 effort to date the Shroud of Turin, venerated by millions of Christians as the burial cloth of Jesus. (Radiocarbon tests indicated the frayed length of linen was created in the Middle Ages, although Lukasik cast doubts on those findings.)

His focus later shifted from nuclear weapons to cybersecurity, a field that existed in part because of the support he secured for ARPANET. The network spawned a communications revolution that played out at first in DARPA’s offices, where Lukasik encouraged the use of a system now known as email, checking messages about once an hour, often from a 30-pound “portable” computer terminal that he lugged on his travels.

Most anything was up for study, he said, with one caveat: If “you’re going to do something that looks like it’s 40,000 miles away from defense, please leave our name off of it.”