Harold Agnew, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory Director who worked on the Manhattan Project and later led the effort to train the first group of international atomic inspectors, died Sunday, his family announced. He was 92. 
 
 This 1970 photo provided by the Los Alamos National Laboratory shows Norris Bradbury, left, and Harold Agnew, right, the second and third directors of Los Alamos National Laboratory, posing for a photo.... (Associated Press) 
 
 Agnew died at his home in Solana Beach, California, while watching football and had been suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukemia, his family said. 
 
 According to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Agnew was its third director and served from 1970 to 1979. Under his leadership, Los Alamos developed an underground nuclear test containment program, acquired the first Cray supercomputer, and trained the first class of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. 
 
 He is credited with developing "fail-safe" methods for nuclear weapons that are still used today, the lab said. 
 
 "His contributions to the laboratory made us the institution we are today," current LANL Director Charlie McMillan said in a statement. "It was his vision _ decades ago _ that recognized that national security science brings value to a broad spectrum of breakthroughs. Los Alamos and the nation will be forever in Harold's debt." 
 
 During the Manhattan Project, a World War II program that provided enriched uranium for the atomic bomb, Agnew went to the top secret city of Los Alamos as a graduate student. He was a scientific observer on the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. 
 
 Agnew completed his graduate studies under Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago following World War II and returned to Los Alamos to work in the Weapons Nuclear Engineering division, where he stayed until he became lab director. 
 
 In a 1998 interview with the National Security Archive, a nonprofit group that examines formerly secret U.S. government documents, Agnew said he felt that the world wouldn't see another nuclear bomb attack but still had fears about one during the Cold War. 
 
 "I thought that we had such a retaliatory capability that no sane individual would attack the United States. I just didn't see that happening," Agnew said. "Clearly we were worried with the transport of missiles into Cuba, that being that close that could be a threat and in a way you could argue that Soviets were always very clever." 
 
 Following his career at Los Alamos, Agnew became president and CEO of General Atomics, a position he held until 1985. He chaired the General Advisory Committee of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and served as a science adviser to the White House from 1982 to 1989. 
 
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 Follow Russell Contreras at http://twitter.com/russcontreras ||||| Harold Agnew, a leading figure of the nuclear age who helped design the first atomic bomb as a member of the Manhattan Project, led efforts after World War II to make the weapons more secure and championed the development of nuclear power during a prodigious career that included nearly a decade as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory has died. He was 92. 
 
 Harold Agnew: In the Oct. 2 LATExtra section, the obituary of nuclear physicist Harold Agnew, who helped design the atomic bomb as a member of the Manhattan Project, misspelled the last name of physicist Lawrence Johnston as Johnson. 
 
 Agnew died Sunday while watching football at his home in Solana Beach, Calif., his family said in a statement released by Los Alamos. He had chronic lymphocytic leukemia. 
 
 In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Agnew held a unique vantage point on the nuclear era. A physicist who trained under Enrico Fermi, he helped build the world's first reactor, flew alongside the Enola Gay when it dropped its devastating load on Hiroshima and headed Los Alamos' weaponry division during a prolific postwar period when the lab developed many new weapons, including the thermonuclear warhead for the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile. 
 
 "Harold was an innovator," said Los Alamos National Laboratory historian Alan Carr. "The vast majority of weapons in the nuclear stockpile were designed at Los Alamos and Harold had a hand in designing most of them — I'd say about 75%." 
 
 Agnew, in an interview with the BBC in 2005, said he considered his seminal contribution to building the U.S. nuclear arsenal to be "my legacy." He remained an unapologetic hawk throughout his life, even after many of the leading scientists of the early nuclear era, including Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, expressed moral qualms about the bomb and its consequences. 
 
 "My feeling towards Hiroshima and the Japanese was, they bloody well deserved it," he told The Times in 1984. "The whole damn thing has been turned around as if we were the bad guys." 
 
 The blunt-spoken scientist had no qualms about advancing his views in Washington. He advised President Carter against a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing in 1978, arguing that it would not only halt the development of new weapons but weaken the deterrence value of the existing arsenal. The White House ultimately abandoned the idea of a test ban. 
 
 At the same time, Agnew spearheaded efforts to substantially improve nuclear security. In the early 1960s, during an inspection of nuclear caches in Europe, he discovered that the only security on an armed U.S. plane was a lone American soldier with a rifle and no training on how to respond to a threat. Under Agnew's tutelage, scientists at Los Alamos devised a coded safety system, called the permissive action link, to prevent arming a nuclear weapon without proper authorization. 
 
 Agnew oversaw the installation of the safety system on all nuclear weapons in Europe as scientific advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe from 1961 to 1964. 
 
 After the Cold War ended, he was instrumental in molding a new mission for Los Alamos, overseeing the creation of programs unrelated to defense, including projects involving nuclear energy, basic science and biomedical research. 
 
 During his nine-year tenure, Los Alamos also acquired the first Cray supercomputer, developed an underground test containment program and trained the first group of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. 
 
 "It was his vision — decades ago — that recognized that national security science brings value to a broad spectrum of breakthroughs. Los Alamos and the nation will be forever in Harold's debt," Los Alamos National Laboratory director Charlie McMillan said in a statement. 
 
 Harold Melvin Agnew was born in Denver on March 28, 1921. He earned a degree in chemistry from the University of Denver in 1942 and joined a research group headed by Fermi, the Italian-born physicist whose work led to the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in Chicago on Dec. 2, 1942. "The [radiation] counter would get going faster and faster," Agnew recalled in The Times about watching the reaction. "That was sort of exciting, but I really didn't understand what the implications were." 
 
 The implications became clearer when he followed Fermi to the Manhattan Project, the top-secret government program at Los Alamos, N.M., where the sole objective was to develop the atomic bomb. 
 
 Agnew was a member of the project from 1943 to 1946. On Aug. 6, 1945, he was aboard a B-29 flying parallel to the Enola Gay when the bomb was unleashed over Hiroshima. With fellow physicists Luis Alvarez and Lawrence Johnson, he measured the yield or force of the explosion using parachutes equipped with blast sensors. The team took turns observing the mushroom cloud through a tiny window. Agnew had brought along a 16-millimeter movie camera to take rare footage of the horrific event. 
 
 Eighty thousand people died in the explosion and thousands more perished later from radiation and other injuries. An additional 60,000 to 80,000 died as a result of the bombing of Nagasaki three days later. 
 
 After the war, Agnew earned his master's and doctorate from the University of Chicago and returned to Los Alamos in 1949. He continued to work on weapon development while serving as a New Mexico state senator, from 1955 to 1961. He was leader of the weapons division when he was named the director of the 7,000-employee lab in 1970. 
 
 In 1979, he left Los Alamos to become president of the San Diego company General Atomics, where he steered the innovation of new reactors, including the helium-cooled reactor. 
 
 Agnew, who retired in 1985, is survived by a son, John; a daughter, Nancy Chapman; four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. 
 
 Although he never had regrets about his role in launching the U.S. into the nuclear age, Agnew said he would require every world leader to witness an atomic blast every five years while standing in his underwear "so he feels the heat and understands just what he's screwing around with," he told The Times, "because we're approaching an era where there aren't any of us left that have ever seen a megaton bomb go off. 
 
 "And once you've seen one, it's rather sobering." 
 
 elaine.woo@latimes.com
– Harold Agnew, a physicist who helped build the first atomic bomb and served as a director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, died yesterday at his home in Solana Beach, Calif. He was 92. Agnew, who was suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukemia, died while watching football on TV, the AP reports. A key figure in the nuclear age, Agnew also helped build the world's first reactor and many new weapons in the postwar period. "Harold was an innovator," says a Los Alamos historian, per the LA Times. "The vast majority of weapons in the nuclear stockpile were designed at Los Alamos and Harold had a hand in designing most of them—I'd say about 75%." Unlike many nuclear-era scientists, Agnew remained unapologetic for his contributions. He autographed the "Little Boy" bomb destined for Hiroshima, and flew in a plane alongside the Enola Gay, capturing the mushroom cloud on 16-mm film, the New York Times reports. "My feeling towards Hiroshima and the Japanese was, they bloody well deserved it," he said in a 1984 interview, per the LA Times. Agnew did, however, believe every world leader should be required to watch an atomic blast every five years ... while standing in their underwear. "We're approaching an era where there aren't any of us left that have ever seen a megaton bomb go off," he said. "And once you've seen one, it's rather sobering."