Ray Kidder

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Ray Edward Kidder (born November 12, 1923 in New York City - December 3, 2019 ) was an American physicist .

Kidder received his PhD in physics from Ohio State University in 1950 . From 1950 to 1956 he was a senior physicist at California Research Corporation. From 1956 he was at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , where he was department head in the theory department and worked on the development of nuclear weapons, in particular through numerical simulation. He was one of the chairs of the committee that prepared the final H-bomb tests in the Pacific ( Operation Dominic ) before the end of the aboveground nuclear tests, with the task of obtaining the necessary information to proceed with computer simulations. In the early 1960s he applied that with Stirling Colgate and John Nuckolls to laser fusion, and from 1962 to 1972 he directed the laboratory's related program, the first at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 1990 he retired.

In 1979, in the debate about an article in the magazine The Progressive by Howard Morland, in which the so-called secret of the H-bomb was uncovered from openly accessible information, he spoke out against censorship in contrast to Hans Bethe , which initially resulted in a secret correspondence between him and Bethe (disclosed 2001), in which he finally convinced Bethe of his position.

He also criticized the decision of the US government in 1997 for an expensive maintenance program for its nuclear arsenal (Stockpile Stewardship) as unnecessary expenditure. When the American Arms Control and Disarmament Agency commissioned him to analyze current practice, he was denied access to secret material in 1998 even though he had the necessary security clearance. This created a public controversy.

In 1999, he spoke out in favor of the US joining the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (which it has not done until today (2017)) and countered fears that this would undermine the US's nuclear deterrent capabilities. In the 1990s, he assisted Senate members and government officials as an advisor in extending the test moratorium in the USA during the Clinton administration.

In 1993 he received the Leo Szilard Lectureship Award . He was a fellow of the American Physical Society . In 1989 he received a Humboldt Research Award .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birth and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ^ Bethe-Kidder correspondence
  3. ↑ Kidder, Problems with stockpile stewardship, Nature, Vol 386, 17 April 1997
  4. ↑ He even has the highest safety clearance of the Department of Energy (Q Clearance) and is himself an expert on safety issues, who wrote many sections of the relevant regulations in his laboratory himself.
  5. ↑ Ray Kidder, Lynn Sykes, Frank von Hippel : False Fears About a Test Ban, The Washington Post, October 10, 1999, archive version
personal data
SURNAME Kidder, Ray
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kidder, Ray Edward (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH November 12, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH 3rd December 2019