Arnold Kramish

Arnold Kramish (June 6, 1923 – June 15, 2010) was an American nuclear physicist and author who was associated with the Manhattan Project. While working on the project, he was nearly killed in an accident at the Philadelphia Naval Yard where a prototype thermal diffusion isotope separation device was being constructed. The priest of the Philadelphia Naval Yard offered last rites to Kramish, who refused, as he was Jewish. After World War II, he wrote numerous books on nuclear issues. He is perhaps best known for his book The Griffin - the greatest untold espionage story of World War II, about Paul Rosbaud, who passed important scientific and military information from Germany to the Allies.

Kramish was born on June 6, 1923, in Denver and received his undergraduate degree in 1945 from the University of Denver. He moved on to Harvard University, where he majored in physics and was awarded a master's degree in 1947.

While still in college, Kramish was assigned to work on the Manhattan Project, working in the special engineering division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico and at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. While working on a test in Philadelphia on September 2, 1944, Kramish was critically injured in the explosion of uranium enrichment equipment. Two chemists were killed immediately and two soldiers received severe burns in the accident, which occurred while they were trying to unclog an enrichment device which exploded, releasing steam laced with uranium hexafluoride and hydrofluoric acid. Kramish would later call the blast "perhaps then the largest release in history of radioactive materials".

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