George Kistiakowsky

George Bogdanovich Kistiakowsky (1900 to 1982) was a Ukrainian-American physical chemist born in Boyarka in the Russian Empire, who died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During the Second World War he led the explosives division of the Manhattan Project, designing the precisely shaped explosive lenses needed to compress the plutonium core of an implosion-type atomic bomb, a problem central to the Trinity test and the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. He later served as President Dwight Eisenhower's Science Advisor from 1959 to 1961, shaping early nuclear arms control policy, and in his later years became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and of weapons research he had once helped lead.