Dennis M. Gormley: an extraordinary career, a kind and generous man

Abstract

Dennis Gormley passed away on October 15, 2020, and I still can’t find the words to capture the sense of loss that I’ve been feeling ever since. Dennis was my husband and my best friend. For the past 17 years we were, as he liked to say, “joined at the hip,” working, traveling, laughing, and enjoying life with friends and family, always together. His passing created a big void in my life, but the outpouring of letters from former students, friends, colleagues, and perfect strangers reminded me that my sadness was shared by many and that his life and work will have a lasting impact on the security field and on the lives of those who crossed his path. For many, Dennis is known as the world’s leading expert in cruise missile proliferation; sometimes he was introduced as the “king of cruise missiles.” His natural modesty made him wince at these grandiose titles but they were well deserved, and I particularly liked the second one, because if he was king, that made me queen of something. Dennis was indeed a forward thinker, often ahead of the curve as far as identifying security challenges. His bookMissile Contagion, published in 2008, elevated the threat of landattack cruise missiles to the level of collective consciousness, influencing how the United States and other countries think about this threat. His authority on cruise missiles was such that, at a conference overseas where he was invited as a speaker, a foreign government official asked him if he would authorize the sale of American cruise missiles to his country! In reflecting on why Missile Contagion has had such a profound impact on understanding the cruise missile threat and why so many researchers, including myself, continue to reread the book to remind themselves of specific details or technical information, I realized thatMissile Contagion was in fact a microcosm of Dennis’s extraordinary career. In this journal of nonproliferation record, I would like to highlight aspects of Dennis’s career that informed his approach to security challenges and gave him broad and deep knowledge that, as long-time friend and colleague at the University of Pittsburgh Phil Williams put it, allowed him to merge technology, politics, and strategy in a way few other people did. In reading Dennis’s writings, one cannot help noticing the elegance and clarity of his prose. Dennis was always fascinated by the written word, and he often said that he owed his longstanding interest in good writing to Sister Benedict, an 89-year-old nun in his Catholic school, who hammered into her pupils the importance of writing well and without errors, even during mathematics lessons. But the clarity of Dennis’s writing is also due to his extraordinary career that spanned more than 50 years as a practitioner