History: Leonard Rieser

[Mike Grissom <mikeg@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

radsafe'ers,

Another, better known, former Manhattan Project
scientist has died (from the December 19, 1998
San Mateo County Times, with a New York Times
byline):

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           Nuclear physicist, activist
            Leonard Rieser dies at 76

Leonard Moos Rieser, a physicist who helped usher in
the nuclear age with the Manhattan Project and
crusaded to curb the arsenals it spawned, died on
Tuesday at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in
Lebanon, New Hampshire [USA]. He was 76 and lived
in Norwich, Vermont [USA].

The cause was cancer, said officials at Dartmouth
College, where he was a professor and administrator
for 46 years.

Rieser (pronounced REE-zer) helped steer Dartmouth
through a period of considerable growth. He was
nationally known as president and chairman of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science
in the 1970s, and was chairman of the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists from 1985 until his retirement in
June. He joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1952.

Rieser's administrative service spanned 25 years,
during which he was chairman of the physics department,
deputy provost for the sciences, dean of the faculty
and provost.

A native of Chicago, Leonard Rieser graduated with a
degree in physics from the University of Chicago in
1943, and was then posted by the Army to the Manhattan
Project, which produced the first nuclear chain
reaction in 1942 and ultimately developed the atomic
bomb. He worked at the Manhattan Project's
metallurgical laboratory in Chicago and at the Los
Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, where he witnessed
the first atomic explosion.

After the war he worked as a researcher for Otto
Frisch at Los Alamos, and received his doctorate in
physics from Stanford University in 1952.

As chairman of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
Rieser was seen in many news photographs resetting the
publication's "Doomsday Clock" to dramatize the threat
of nuclear annihilation.


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