Gordon Evans Dean (December 28, 1905 – August 15, 1958) was a Seattle-born American lawyer and prosecutor who served as chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) from 1950 to 1953. Early years Dean received his J.D. from the University of Southern California in 1930 and an LL.M. from Duke University Law School in 1932. In 1934, Dean joined the U.S. Department of Justice during the New Deal administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Dean served under Attorneys General Homer S. Cummings and Frank Murphy as a Criminal Division attorney and press spokesperson. He had taught at Duke Law before being hired as assistant to Brien McMahon in the Criminal Division. Dean helped draft expansions of the federal criminal law and defended them in cases argued before the United States Supreme Court. In 1940, Attorney General Robert H. Jackson made Dean the press spokesperson for the Department of Justice. After six years at Justice, Dean left to join McMahon's law firm as partner. After World War II military service, Dean served as press spokesperson for now Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson who was the chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials. Prior to his work with the AEC, Dean was professor of criminal law at the University of Southern California (1946–1949). Atomic Energy Commission Dean was appointed by President Harry S. Truman to fill a vacancy on the Atomic Energy Commission, and he took his seat on May 24, 1949. Dean had been recommended to Truman by McMahon, who by this time had become Senator (elected in 1944), author of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, and chair of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee of Congress. During August 1949–January 1950 there was a heated debate within the U.S. government and scientific community over whether to proceed with an accelerated development of the hydrogen bomb, a nuclear weapon of massive and unprecedented force. Dean shared with McMahon and Truman a belief that the Soviet Union presented an immediate threat to the security of the United States, and that countering that threat with military superiority in the present was worth the costs of a longer-term arms race. Accordingly, Dean was in October 1949 one of two AEC commissioners who supported proceeding with such development, against three who opposed it. The AEC's General Advisory Committee (GAC), chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer, also opposed the H-bomb development. Dean supported the scope of