Siddhesh Joshi (Editor)

Timothy Hampton

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit
Name
  
Timothy Hampton


Role
  
Author

Education
  
Princeton University (1987)

Awards
  
Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada

Books
  
Fictions of Embassy: Literature, Writing from History: T, Literature and Nation in the Sixt

Bob Dylan's Poetics


Timothy Hampton (1962–2009) was a specialist in weapons of mass destruction and an employee of the preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) in Vienna, Austria since 1998.

Contents

Death

Hampton died in an apparent fall from the 17th floor of his workplace, Building E, at the Vienna International Centre in Vienna, Austria. According to a United Nations spokesman, he was found dead at the bottom of an internal stairwell at around 8.00 am on Tuesday, 20 October 2009. Hampton was trained as a biochemist and had worked with David Kelly, the director of microbiology at Porton Down, Britain's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, before moving onto nuclear test-ban projects. Hampton is survived by his partner, Olena Gryshcuk and a 3 year old child. Gryshcuk is reported to be a weapons inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Controversies

  • An initial autopsy concluded that there were no suspicious circumstances; however, a second post-mortem examination, performed by pathologist Professor Kathrin Yen, on behalf of the family, detected internal bruising caused by strangulation and concluded these were not consistent with suicide.
  • Hampton’s sister, Beverley Hampton intervened with the Austrian authorities in November 2009 to prevent her brother's clothes, worn at the time of his death, from being destroyed.
  • Richard Benyon, the family’s Member of Parliament, raised the matter of Hampton’s death with Foreign Office Minister Chris Bryant.
  • The United Nations has denied claims that Hampton had been involved in talks discussing nuclear testing in Iran.

    • Alleged North Korean nuclear test anomaly

    In September 2009, an article appeared in the CBTO Newsletter, 'Spectrum' the piece was co-authored by Hampton and he is recognized as part of a team maintaining CBTO software which analyses International Monitoring System data. The article suggests that data collected from a DPRK announced nuclear test on 25 May 2009, did not exhibit the radionuclide emission signature that might be expected from the seismic event observed. The article is careful to defer to CBTO Member States as the final arbiter of the origin of these events, but the conclusion from the data is clear: Either emissions from the 4 kiloton event were contained at an unlikely level of > 99.9%, or the event was a non-nuclear, man made explosion.

    References

    Timothy Hampton Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA