What is the full name of the person who was in charge of designing a nuclear reactor?
Henry D. Smyth was a professor of physics and chairman of the physics department of Princeton University from 1935 to 1949. During World War II, he was involved in the Manhattan Project from early 1941, initially as a member of the National Defense Research Committee’s Committee on Uranium, and later as an associate director of the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago. In late 1943, the President of Princeton University, Harold W. Dodds, began insisting that Smyth work part-time at Princeton, where there was a shortage of physicists because so many of them were engaged in war work. Princeton had commitments to teach army and navy personnel, and he needed physicists like Smyth to meet those commitments. Smyth therefore became a consultant at Chicago, where he was in charge of designing a nuclear reactor that used heavy water as a neutron moderator, and commuted from Princeton, working in Chicago on alternate weeks.In early 1944, Smyth raised the possibility of producing an unclassified report for the general public on the achievements of the Manhattan Project. The director of the Metallurgical Laboratory, Arthur Compton, supported the idea. He arranged a meeting with James B. Conant, the President of Harvard University and one of the senior administrators of the Manhattan Project, who had similar thoughts. Conant took up the matter with the Manhattan Project's director, Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr.. In April, Smyth received a formal letter from Groves asking him to write such a report. Both the report and the choice of Smyth as its author were approved by the Manhattan Project’s governing body, the Military Policy Committee, in May 1944.The Report was to serve two functions. First, it was to be the public and official U.S. government account of the development of the atomic bombs, outlining the development of the then-secret laboratories and production sites at Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington, and the basic physical processes responsible for the functioning of nuclear weapons, in particular nuclear fission and the nuclear chain reaction. Second, it served as a reference for other scientists as to what information was declassified—anything said in the Smyth Report could be said freely in open literature. For this reason, the Smyth Report focused heavily on information already available in declassified literature, such as much of the basic nuclear physics used in weapons, which was either already widely known in the scientific community or could have been easily deduced by a competent scientist.Smyth stated the purpose of the Smyth Report in the Preface:
Henry D. Smyth