Remembering Robert Alvarez: A Life in Activism

A Campaigner Who Linked the “Inside” and the “Outside”

The Institute for Policy Studies has always been unique among D.C.-based think tanks because of its “inside-outside” strategy. While most research organizations try to get their work in front of “insider” media and policy makers, from its earliest beginnings IPS has also prioritized deep relationships with “outsider” social movements and advocates.

And few public scholars in history have done more either “inside” or “outside” than our nuclear policy expert, Robert “Bob” Alvarez, who died recently after several years of living with Parkinson’s.

Bob won a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022 from the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. They called him “one of the bedrock founders of the national movement to unmask the human and environmental carnage that resulted directly from the U.S. production of a massive nuclear arsenal.”

For decades, Bob worked as an activist and expert both in and out of government — not just to fight nuclear proliferation, but to witness, document, and rectify the extraordinary crimes against marginalized U.S. communities and the environment by the nuclear weapons complex. He was “a key voice in the campaign to clean up America’s vast and deadly network of nuclear-waste sites,” according to The New York Times, who “helped expose the environmental and health dangers of nuclear-weapon production.”

As a writer, organizer, Senate staffer, and Department of Energy official, Bob traveled the country making common cause with “downwinders” sickened by U.S. nuclear tests, Navajo uranium miners suffering the effects of exposure, and nuclear workers abandoned by the government that employed them.

Over his long career, he managed to stop destructive projects, clean up contaminated sites, get justice for communities who’ve been harmed, and even to dismantle nuclear weapons, sell them for scrap, and return the proceeds to U.S. taxpayers.

Bob “was a fixture in the halls of Congress, standing out as much for his trademark New Balance sneakers and thick mustache as for his firm command of nuclear policy and politics. He remained so even after he left government in 1999,” the Times reports.

He was a co-founder of the Environmental Policy Institute, a longtime senior scholar at IPS, and a regular contributor to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

In the years before he died, Bob shared a series of vignettes with us — short memoirs from his extraordinary life in public service. In his honor, we’ve collected a few of those below. In an age when the progressive movement needs hope, determination, and victories, Bob’s decades of work offered all three.

We’re forever grateful.

Bob’s Mini Memoirs