Arnold Kramish, a physicist and author who worked on the Manhattan Project, passed away on Tuesday, June 15, 2010. Kramish was a member of the Special Engineering Detachment at Los Alamos from 1944 to 1946. He nearly lost his life in the famous
Philadelphia Navy Yard explosion
that killed Douglas Meigs and Peter Bragg in September 1944. The event was extraordinary within the history of the Manhattan Project. Due to the extreme secrecy of the project, the nature of the incident was veiled from the public and it wasn't until years later that the story began to emerge.
Kramish also served with the RAND Corporation, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and other government agencies. He taught at UCLA and the London School of Economics and received both a Carnegie Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Kramish was the author of a number of books, most famously
The Griffin: The Greatest Untold Espionage Story of World War II, which tells the story of Paul Rosbaud, a German science editor who passed secrets to Winston Churchill during the Second World War. Kramish lived in Reston, VA, and was a good friend of the Atomic Heritage Foundation.
