Kenneth Nichols (13 November 1907-21 February 2000) was a US Army Major-General and a civil engineer who worked on the Manhattan Project.
Biography[]
Kenneth David Nichols was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1907, and he graduated from West Point in 1929 and served in the US Army in Nicaragua alongside Leslie Groves before specializing in civil engineering and studying in Berlin. In 1941, Nichols oversaw the construction of the Rome Air Depot in New York, and he worked on several other infrastructure projects (such as the Clinton Engineer Works at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the Hanford Engineer Works plutonium production facility in Washington) before working as Groves' right-hand man during the Manhattan Project. Nichols remained with the project after World War II until it was taken over by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947, and he taught at West Point before being promoted to Major-General and given command over the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. In 1950, he became deputy director of the Guided Missiles Division of the Department of Defense, serving as its chief of research ad development on its reorganization in 1952. Nichols became general manager of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1953, promoting the construction of nuclear power plants, and he played a major role in the revocation of J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance in 1954. He retired in 1953, and he worked as an engineering consultant of private nuclear power plants in late life, dying in 2000 in Bethesda, Maryland.