Manhattan Project Scientists: George Kistiakowsky

George Kistiakowsky was head of the Explosives Division at Los Alamos.

LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY

Quick Facts

Significance:

George Kistiakowsky was head of the Explosive Division at Los Alamos and was responsible for the development of the complex explosive lenses for the implosion weapon.

Place of Birth:

Boyarka, Ukraine

Date of Birth:

November 18, 1900

Place of Death:

Cambridge, MA

Date of Death:

December 7, 1982

Place of Burial:

Ashes scattered near his summer home on Cape Cod

Many of the scientists in the Manhattan Project had had to flee their homelands, but few had as eventful a story as explosives expert George Kistiakowsky (1900-1982). He was born into “an old Ukrainian Cossack family which was part of the intellectual elite in pre-revolutionary Russia.” In 1917 he had to flee the Russian Revolt and joined the infantry and tank corps of the anti-Communist White Army. In 1920 he escaped from Russia on a commandeered French ship, going first to Turkey, next to Yugoslavia, and then to Germany. At the University of Berlin he received his PhD in physical chemistry in 1925. By 1928 he was an associate professor at Princeton, before finally landing at Harvard in 1930, where he spent most of the rest of his career. 

Early in World War II Kistiakowsky became technical director of the Explosives Research Laboratory, overseeing work with new explosives and doing research into hydrodynamics and the development of shaped charges. When he was invited to join the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in late 1943, this work would be very valuable. As head of the Explosives Division, he was responsible for perfecting the design and fabrication of the complex explosive lenses that were at the heart of the plutonium implosion bomb. He spent hours just prior to the Trinity Test removing tiny flaws from the lenses, and on July 16, 1945, saw the results of his efforts as the Gadget lit the early morning sky. Of it he said, “I am sure that at the end of the world – in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence – the last human will see what we saw.”

After the war he received numerous awards and served on the President’s Science Advisory Committee, directed the Office of Science and Technology Policy, chaired the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, and was chairman of the anti-proliferation organization, Council for a Livable World. His daughter Vera, who had loved horseback riding in the mountains while spending summers with him in Los Alamos, became the first woman appointed as a professor of physics at MIT.