Alice Kimball Smith’s Interview
Historian and educator Alice Kimball Smith moved to Los Alamos in 1943 after her husband Cyril, a British metallurgist, joined the Manhattan Project. Alice took a job as a schoolteacher at Los Alamos. She later became the assistant editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and wrote “A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America, 1945-1947.” She also co-edited a collection of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s letters. In this interview, Kimball Smith describes her impressions of Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project. She discusses Oppenheimer and other atomic scientists’ efforts to ensure international control of the bomb after World War II, as well as her memories of other scientists such as Niels Bohr.