Simon Ramo obituary
Simon Ramo, who has died aged 103, was a great of American corporate science who described himself as a "hybrid of a scientist, engineer and entrepreneur". But it was his role, from 1953 onwards, as the father of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), that would make Ramo a key figure in the American technocratic elite, and in the shaping of the cold war.
Ramo had made his mark with the Hughes Aircraft Company - but his association with the defence contractor and its maverick owner, Howard Hughes, ended one Saturday morning in the summer of 1953. A Hughes Chevrolet picked Ramo up from his home in Santa Monica, California, and drove him to a nearby beach house-cum-mansion built by the press baron William Randolph Hearst - the model for Citizen Kane - for his movie star lover Marion Davies. There, Ramo had the last of his encounters with Hughes. The multimillionaire recluse, wrote the scientist, was "eccentric, uneducated, uninformed [and] virtually out of communication with the world".
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