Henry DeWolf Smyth

Henry DeWolf Smyth, known as Harry, was an American physicist, diplomat and administrator, born on 1 May 1898 in Clinton, New York, and died on 11 September 1986. He studied at Princeton and Cambridge, where he worked under Ernest Rutherford, and taught physics at Princeton from 1924 to 1966, chairing the department from 1935 to 1949. His early research on the ionization of gases turned toward nuclear physics in the mid 1930s. During the Second World War he sat on the Uranium Committee and served as a consultant to the Manhattan Project, and he wrote its first public official history, known as the Smyth Report, which told the public how nuclear fission was being turned into a source of fissile material. He was a member of the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1949 to 1954 and United States ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1961 to 1970, where he helped bring about the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. He received the Atoms for Peace Award in 1968.