Robert "Bob" Wertheim (9 November 1922 – 29 April 2020) was an American naval officer involved in the development of strategic weapons.

After retiring from the United States Navy as a rear admiral (upper half), he was a senior vice president at Lockheed Corporation, and engaged in consulting work.

[11] Upon completing electronics school, Wertheim was assigned to the destroyer escort USS Maloy, which spent the winter of 1947 providing electricity to Maine.

[11] Following his assignment to Maloy, Wertheim was reassigned to Sandia Base, where he was a member of the Navy's first nuclear bomb assembly team.

[13] He wished to study nuclear physics, but was due for a sea assignment; accordingly, he selected the seaplane tender USS Norton Sound, which was used to test guided missiles.

[11] As a lieutenant in 1955, Wertheim headed the group that worked on the design of the atmospheric reentry body of the warheads mounted onto the UGM-27 Polaris.

During that time he continued the work he began in 1955, heading the Re-Entry Body Section, receiving the Navy Commendation Medal for his efforts.

[3] While there, he worked on the development of the AIM-9 Sidewinder for naval surface air defense, called Osprey, which was ultimately cancelled in 1963; he was able to take that work and utilize it for the Army and Marine Corps Air Defense Artillery, including influencing the naming of the system, the MIM-72 Chaparral,[3][11][18] Chaparral being the name for a roadrunner in Mexican Spanish, the state bird for Wertheim's home state.

[11][18] In late 1962, Wertheim was reassigned to the Pentagon, serving under the Director of Defense Research and Engineering Harold Brown, whom he had met while working on the Polaris missile.

[20] With the report written by Wertheim in hand, President John F. Kennedy met with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan convincing the United Kingdom to not continue development of the Skybolt system, and adopt the Polaris ballistic missile as its nuclear deterrent.

[11][20] Wertheim remained at the Pentagon as the Military Assistant for Strategic Weapons until August 1965, which earned him a Joint Service Commendation Medal.

[2] In 2000, on behalf of the University of California, he was the lead of a review of Los Alamos National Laboratory after hard drives temporarily went missing.