Ralph Lapp, who helped create atomic weapons from the early days of the Manhattan Project and then spent his life speaking about the dangers of fallout but the relative safety of nuclear power, has died. He was 87.
Mr. Lapp died Sept. 7 in Alexandria, Va., of pneumonia following surgery.
A native of Buffalo, Mr. Lapp was a graduate of the University of Chicago, where he also earned his doctorate. He was studying cosmic rays, showers and bursts at the U. of C. in the early years of World War II. He worked with equipment set up in the press box of the campus’ Stagg Field, high above a mysterious research facility, dubbed “Metallurgical Laboratory,” under the stadium’s stands.
“One day, while lugging down a Geiger counter, I … soon found myself inside the stands amid other white-jacketed men,” he wrote in his 1953 book “The New Force.”
Those men included Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and other scientists working on the first nuclear chain reactions for the top-secret Manhattan Project, which would produce the atomic bomb. Mr. Lapp joined them and, from 1943 to 1945, became associate physicist and assistant laboratory director.
In July 1945, Mr. Lapp was one of nearly 80 atomic scientists who signed a petition urging President Harry Truman not to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
When Congress created the first Atomic Energy Commission in 1946, Mr. Lapp became assistant director of the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, one of four research centers established by the legislation.
He was liaison to the armed services on military applications of atomic energy, which took him to Bikini Atoll as a consulting scientist for nuclear testing in 1946.
Later, through the energy-management system Quadri-Science Inc. and then his own Lapp Inc., the physicist spent half a century advising the public to protect itself from nuclear warfare by constructing underground fallout shelters and reining in nuclear-arms buildup. At the same time, he stressed that nuclear energy was safe and essential for a modern society.
