Alice Kimball Smith (1907–2001) was an American historian, writer, and teacher, particularly known from her writing from personal experience on the Manhattan Project.[1][2][3]
In 1943 her and her husband Cyril moved to Los Alamos when her husband joined the Manhattan Project.[1] She soon got a teaching job in Los Alamos where her and her husband became friends with J. Robert Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty.[1] She would use her experiences around Los Alamos as material in her future books.[6][7][8]
Smith, in her study of American A-bomb scientists interviewed many Los Alamos scientists who gave blank answers about the nature of the weapon that they were creating.[9]
Smith wrote books like A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists' Movement in America, 1945–1947[12][13] and co edited (with Charles Weiner)[14]Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections[15] with the latter being a collection of letters from J. Robert Oppenheimer between 1922 and 1945.[1][16][17][18] Her book A Peril and a Hope: The Scientist' Movement in America, 1945–1947 was nominated for a National Book Award for Nonfiction in the Science, Philosophy and Religion category.[19]A Peril and a Hope was about the growing negative sentiment of scientists about creating the atomic bomb due to their concerns over the sociopolitical consequences of its usage.[20]
^Buck, Peter (1978). "Images of the Scientific 'Community': Commentary on Papers by Alice Kimball Smith and Dorothy Nelkin". Newsletter on Science, Technology, & Human Values. 3 (24): 45–47. doi:10.1177/016224397800300322. JSTOR688705. S2CID144558873.
^Monk, Ray (March 11, 2014). Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center. Anchor. p. 880. ISBN978-0385722049.
^Boyer, Paul (September 30, 1994). By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture At the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1st ed.). The University of North Carolina Press. p. 464. ISBN978-0807844809.