At the age of 100, Michael M. May, PhD, passed away on May 17, 2026.
Dr. May was a UC Berkeley-trained physicist who, from 1965 to 1971, became the fifth director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and later co-directed the Center for International Security and Cooperation as a professor at Stanford University. For four months in 2024, during multiple interview sessions, Dr. May and I recorded nineteen hours of his oral history, which explored in detail his fascinating, century-long life, from his youth in France and Vietnam to his career as a physicist who shaped US nuclear deterrence strategy and international arms control policies. In 2025, the Oral History Center published his 341-page transcript as Michael M. May: A Career in Physics, Nuclear Weapons Design, and Arms Control.
When recording his oral history at age 98, Dr. May recounted remarkable details from his youth and early education, including recitation of French poetry he heard as a boy from his grandfather in Paris. May also recounted family histories of his maternal great-grandfather Ludovic Trarieux, a renowned French senator and human-rights pioneer, as well as memories of his siblings and his parents. May’s strong and adventurous mother, Juliette Meyer-May (née Trarieux), raised her children on three continents and discovered a new kind of freedom after settling eventually in the United States. His peripatetic father, Jacques Meyer May, MD, honed his medical skills in France amid the carnage of the World War I before commencing a fascinating career that took him around the planet as a professor and medical geographer.
Michael M. May, their eldest son, was born just before Christmas in December 1925 in Marseille, France. The young May spent much of his childhood near or in Paris, where he leapt ahead in school despite spending more than a year recovering at home from complications of Polio. At age 12, in 1938, May moved with his family to Hanoi, Vietnam, in what he knew then as French Indochina. May again shared cogent details of his travels from the south of France through the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal and across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia. Upon arrival, May also recalled family trips and holidays throughout in the late 1930s, including at Ha Long Bay, Lang Son, and in Cambodia where he visited Angkor and Phnom Penh. Back in Hanoi, where May’s father trained Vietnamese doctors in the city hospital, young Michael rose to the top of his class at Lycée Albert Sarrault in Hanoi.
In 1940, to avoid the spread of World War II across Asia’s Pacific Rim, May immigrated to the United States with his mother and siblings. Just as the Nazi blitzkrieg toppled France back in Europe, May’s mother left his father in Asia to sail with her children on a Canadian passenger ship from Haiphong in Vietnam to Hong Kong and Shanghai in China, to Nagasaki, Kobe, and Yokohama in Japan, across the Pacific Ocean to Victoria, British Columbia, in Canada, then to Seattle, Washington. Due to his father’s connections with a former patient, May and his family settled in Walla Walla, Washington, where May honed his English skills, worked in the farm fields during summer, and completed high school at the age of 16. May remained in town, earning his B.A. in Math and Physics from Whitman College in 1944 before being drafted into the US Army, where he served domestically in weapons testing and trained as a paratrooper. After discharge from the Army, and armed with educational funding from the GI Bill, May briefly attended the University of Washington in Seattle before driving south to California in 1947 to enroll at UC Berkeley where he pursued his PhD in physics.
UC Berkeley’s Department of Physics had earned international renown before and during World War II, with numerous professors returning to campus after their wartime service in the Manhattan Project. As a graduate student, May studied with renowned physics professors including Emilio Segrè, Wolfgang “Pief” Panofsky, Gian-Carlo Wick, Tsung-Dao Lee, Luis Alvarez, and Herbert York. May also experienced collateral damage from the Loyalty Oath controversy, as several of his professors left Berkeley rather than sign the anti-communist and anti-subversion statement then required by the regents of the University of California. May eventually earned his Ph.D. in Physics in 1952, the same year he married Mary Cottrell, whom he first met as a teenager in Washington state. They have four children, born between 1953 and 1963, and remained married until Mary’s death in 2007.
In 1952, May’s academic advisor Herb York and Ernest O. Lawrence invited May to join the staff at the newly established Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), then called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. On his first day of work, May learned their work would focus on nuclear weapons development, which came as a surprise. As part of his work, May described witnessing in 1954 the fifteen-megaton Castle Bravo thermonuclear test on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where, among other details, he recalled supplying US General LeMay’s airplane with cases of duty-free whiskey. May spent most of his career at Livermore Laboratory, although he worked briefly in Los Angeles from 1957 to 1960. Back at LLNL, May devoted his significant intellectual abilities to the work, including instrumental efforts on the Navy’s Polaris nuclear warhead, which enabled American submarines with nuclear-missile capabilities. Despite these events occurring more than half-a-century earlier, May was careful throughout his oral history not to discuss details that might divulge nuclear secrecy. Instead, he shared fascinating details about social relations within and outside the laboratory, the organizational evolution of Livermore Laboratories over the years, as well as his own research in astrophysics and his teaching for UC Davis in the Department of Applied Science adjacent to Livermore Labs.
May eventually became the associate director for nuclear design before serving as Director of Livermore Laboratories from 1965 to 1971. During his time as director, May recalled the influence of the Vietnam War, the laboratory’s relationships with the US Congress and the University of California, and the radiation effects controversy stemming from the 1970 book “Population Control” through Nuclear Pollution, by journalist Arthur R. Tamplin and UC Berkeley professor John W. Gofman. Near the end of his term as director, the Atomic Energy Commission presented May in 1970 with the Ernest O. Lawrence Memorial Award for his early and original contributions to the applications of computer techniques and theoretical calculations important to the design of nuclear weapons.
May also worked extensively in nuclear arms control. In 1974, he traveled to Moscow and stayed in the massive Hotel Rossiya on Red Square while serving as the US technical adviser for the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, also called the Treaty on the Limitation of Underground Nuclear Weapon Tests, which capped underground nuclear tests at a yield of 150 kilotons. From 1974 to 1979, May spent much time in or near Geneva while serving on the US delegation to the second Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II), which aimed to establish equivalence or parity with the Soviet Union regarding nuclear missiles. May replaced Paul Nitze on the US delegation and began negotiations in Geneva with his Soviet counterpart, V. Shchukin, an engineer who shared personal memories of the Bolshevik Revolution and, later, of working on Soviet nuclear weapons under the dangerous gaze of Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the Soviet Secret Service. While neither man spoke the other’s national language well, both knew French, so May conducted much of his work on SALT II in the language of his birth. At various times, May also served as a member of the Defense Science Board; the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission; the RAND Corporation Board of Trustees; and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on International Security and Arms Control. He also published influential articles on US nuclear deterrence strategy.
Upon retiring from Livermore Laboratory in 1988, May became a professor in Stanford University’s School of Engineering. There, he co-directed the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) with his friend Bill Perry, who became Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton, and with whom he taught a course on Technology Policy in National Defense. In addition to teaching courses and advising graduate students at Stanford, May’s research interests included nuclear weapons policy, nuclear forensics, as well as studies on energy production and its impact on the environment. May recalled his several visits to a rapidly changing China over the years, including to Guangdong and Hubei provinces for research on carbon-dioxide emissions from coal plants.
Dr. May discussed all of the above and much more throughout his extensive oral history, including reflections on the Strategic Defense Initiative; research in geoscience, nuclear fusion, and climate change; and his longstanding interest and practice in Zen meditation. He also shared fond memories from his personal life, like meeting his future wife Mary, stories of their wedding, and adventures from their fifty-five-year marriage, including their four children. I cherished the many hours I shared with Dr. May while planning, recording, and finalizing his oral history, which includes an appendix of photographs. You can learn more about Dr. May’s incredible life history, as told in his own words, through his oral history:
Dr. May’s family has planned a public memorial service for June 26, 2026 at 10:30am at the Graham-Hitch Mortuary at 4167 1st Street in Pleasanton, California.
