David L. Hill (November 11, 1919 – December 14, 2008) was an American associate experimental physicist who worked on the development of atomic weapons at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory during World War II.
Biography[]
David L. Hill graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1942, and was subsequently recruited as an associate experimental physicist at the University of Chicago's "Met Lab", where he worked under Enrico Fermi and contributed to the Manhattan Project during World War II. After the bombing of Hiroshima, Hill co-authored an article declaring that it was the responsibility of the scientists to ensure that no more atomic bombs would be developed. He worked for California's Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory from 1954 to 1959 and served at Nanosecond Systems Inc. from 1963 to 1972, developing high-precision measuring equipment. In 1959, he testified at Secretary of Commerce Lewis Strauss' US Senate confirmation hearing, where he made the Senate aware that Lewis Strauss was behind J. Robert Oppenheimer's character assassination through the leaking of Boris Pash's documents on Oppenheimer's past communist associations; Hill's testimony helped persuade the Senate to vote against Strauss' nomination to continue his acting service as Commerce Secretary.