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”.

Thanks largely to Ramo and his business partner Dean Wooldridge, Hughes Aircraft, once a minor part of the Hughes Tool Company, had become, in just seven years, extremely lucrative – and a powerhouse for the US military. But Ramo, wearying of Hughes’s paranoia, had quit the company. In the Pacific shore mansion, Hughes was sifting through the wreckage, angling for a deal.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A deactivated Titan II nuclear ICMB in a silo at the Titan Missile museum in Green Valley, Arizona. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

It never came. Instead, the new Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation (R-W) put its impetus and systems engineering into the first generation of ICBMs. And, from the late 1950s, what became Thompson Ramo Wooldridge (TRW) was also supplying technology – and technologists – to Nasa, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

By the end of the 60s, said Ramo, 1% of living physicists worked for TRW. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, TRW provided the module’s descent engine. In 1970 the same engine powered the crippled Apollo 13 on its return from the moon – while TRW technicians were programming its escape trajectory.

Ramo had the talent to second-guess US strategic thinking – from the implications of the A-bomb, through the space race to President Ronald Reagan’s “star wars” fantasy and beyond – and he was also a stern critic of US science policy.

From 1936 until 1946, he had been a leader in microwave and electron microscope research at General Electric’s headquarters in Schenectady, New York state. And after the second world war, while US industry was refocusing on civilian production, Ramo’s hunch was that, following the 1945 nuclear attack on Japan, the Soviet Union would rapidly acquire the A-bomb, generating in turn a huge American response. Ramo had resolved to abandon the bureaucratic rigidity of GE and set up his own business, but then he and Wooldridge were recruited to Hughes Aircraft, a company with flexibility – because it was a company in crisis.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A line of Atlas missiles on an assembly line in San Diego, California, in 1963. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

Having received $60m in wartime government contracts, Hughes had failed to produce any combat aircraft. “Howard,” Ramo was told, “is only interested in girls and aeroplanes – in that order.” Hughes’s aeronautical fantasies were then embodied in the semi-flightless wooden wonder, the Spruce Goose flying boat. “I was impressed with both its colossal size,” Ramo wrote in The Business of Science (1988), “and the lack of common sense which could have led to such a project.”

By 1948 Ramo was vice-president and director of operations with the firm’s aerospace group, working with the newly independent US Air Force, and its nuclear-bomber-equipped Strategic Air Command. In 1949, confirming Ramo’s hunch, the first Soviet A-bomb was detonated. In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. The cold war intensified, and the Hughes Aircraft Company, ranging across missiles, radar, fire-control units and navigation systems, boomed. But Hughes, wrote Ramo, came close “to sinking the whole enterprise”.

“You have made a hell of a mess of a great property,” the air force secretary Harold Talbott told Hughes in 1953, but by then Ramo and Wooldridge were creating R-W. “The new company,” wrote Ramo, “… would become profitable in its second week.” Key USAF personnel – not in uniform – were based at R-W, and from 1954 to 1958 Ramo directed the US ICBM programme, which included the Titan ICBM and the Thor intermediate range missile.

The first US ICBM, the Atlas, was eventually successfully test-fired for its full 6,000-mile range in late 1958. An earlier launch had ended six inches above the pad. “Now we know the thing can fly,” Ramo had observed, “all we have to do is improve its range a bit.”

In October 1957, amid western alarm, the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, the first satellite. A dormant R-W subsidiary, Space Technology Laboratories (later Bunker-Ramo), was activated to spearhead R-W’s contribution to the space race. Ramo’s hunches had again proved perceptive, but he retained many reservations about the manned civilian space programme, even as the Atlas became a Nasa workhorse. By 1961, Ramo concluded that the US had won the ICBM race – and rockets were shifting the priorities of nuclear deterrence from manned aircraft, among all the nuclear powers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The launch sequence of a Titan II missile in 1963. Photograph: PhotoQuest/Getty Images

Ramo was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, the second son of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. His father, Benjamin, came from Brest-Litovsk, now in Belarus, and his mother, Clara (nee Trestman), from the Kiev region of Ukraine. Together they ran a workwear store – with their son bookkeeping and shelf-stacking. As a 12-year-old, Ramo was deliberating between a career as a violinist or a scientist – until he heard the sublime Jascha Heifetz in concert in his home town (they later became friends), which tipped him towards science, as he knew he could never be that good. Nonetheless, at 16, Ramo won a music contest that provided him, in the year of the Wall Street crash, with a scholarship to the University of Utah.

In 1933 Ramo became the university’s youngest graduate when he emerged with top grades in electrical engineering. In 1936 he took a combined doctorate in physics and in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). There Ramo first met Wooldridge. In that year, too, at a time when jobs were scarce and young scientists plentiful, it was Ramo’s talent as a violinist that gave him the extra edge and won him a job at the vast GE corporation, where, by 1943, he had registered 25 patents.

Three years later came the move to Hughes Aircraft and the beginning of Ramo’s ascent to the American scientific pantheon. He was an adviser to presidents from Eisenhower onwards, and he taught and researched at many universities, including California, Caltech and Harvard. From the 40s until recent years, he also published extensively on science and management, and even wrote a book on tennis.

Ramo was awarded more than a dozen honorary degrees, and other honours, included the National Medal of Science (1979), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1982) and the Space Foundation’s lifetime achievement award (2007). He received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Founders medal – and in 1982 the IEEE created the Simon Ramo medal, honouring systems engineers and scientists. In 2014, aged 100, Ramo became the oldest person to receive a patent, having, by then, accumulated more than 40.

His wife, Virginia (nee Smith), whom he married in 1937, died in 2007. He is survived by their two sons, James and Alan, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

• Simon Ramo, entrepreneur and engineer, born 7 May 1913; died 27 June 2016

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