Cyril S. Smith

In 1942, Cyril S. Smith, 39 years old, a native Englishman, was with the federal wartime committee on metallurgy and hating his work. Early in 1943, when the Los Alamos staff was being assembled, chemist Joe Kennedy, a co-discoverer of plutonium, asked Smith if he wanted another job. He accepted immediately, and was appointed chief of metallurgy at Los Alamos. One of his responsibilities was refining plutonium metal for the Trinity test bomb and the Nagasaki weapon. Smith occupied a unique place in atomic bomb history. At Trinity Site, he was the last person to touch the plutonium pieces before they were sealed inside the bomb^‘s core.