Harvey Slatin was an American physicist.
Slatin was born in New York City. He studied chemical engineering at Cornell University prior to joining the U.S. Army, which he did after the attack at Pearl Harbor.
Slatin was assigned to work at Los Alamos as a member of the Special Engineer Detachment (SED). During his time there, Slatin worked on the isolation of plutonium. As he remembered, “We had to win the war and beat the Germans at building the bomb before we did. After it was built, we thought we had won because we built it first. We never actually thought we would use the bomb.” Slatin had mixed feelings after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “It was a great shock to us when we heard over the military radio that so many people were killed. That was a terrible, terrible thing for us.”
After the war, Slatin went to the University of California at Berkeley where he earned a Ph.D. in physics. His later worked involved the development of electroplating processes.
Harvey Slatin died on February 23, 2013, in Stamford, New York.