American nuclear physicists

Hans Albrecht Bethe (German pronunciation: [ˈhans ˈbeːtə] ; July 2, 1906 – March 6, 2005) was a German-American theoretical physicist who made major contributions to nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics, and solid-state physics, and who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. For most of his career, Bethe was a professor at Cornell University.During World War II, he was head of the Theoretical Division at the secret Los Alamos laboratory that developed the first atomic bombs. There he played a key role in calculating the critical mass of the weapons and developing the theory behind the implosion method used in both the Trinity test and the "Fat Man" weapon dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945.
After the war, Bethe also played an important role in the development of the hydrogen bomb, although he had originally joined the project with the hope of proving it could not be made. Bethe later campaigned with Albert Einstein and the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists against nuclear testing and the nuclear arms race. He helped persuade the Kennedy and Nixon administrations to sign, respectively, the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (SALT I).
His scientific research never ceased and he was publishing papers well into his nineties, making him one of the few scientists to have published at least one major paper in his field during every decade of his career, which in Bethe's case spanned nearly seventy years. Freeman Dyson, once his doctoral student, called him the "supreme problem-solver of the 20th century".

Sidney Michael Dancoff (September 27, 1913 in Philadelphia – August 15, 1951 in Urbana, Illinois) was an American theoretical physicist best known for the Tamm–Dancoff approximation method and for nearly developing a renormalization method for solving quantum electrodynamics (QED).

Franco Dino Rasetti (August 10, 1901 – December 5, 2001) was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist, paleontologist and botanist. Together with Enrico Fermi, he discovered key processes leading to nuclear fission. Rasetti refused to work on the Manhattan Project on moral grounds.

John Gleason Cramer Jr. (born October 24, 1934) is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, known for his development of the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. He has been an active participant with the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

Richard Lawrence Garwin (born April 19, 1928) is an American physicist, best known as the author of the first hydrogen bomb design.In 1978, Garwin was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributing to the application of the latest scientific discoveries to innovative practical engineering applications contributing to national security and economic growth.

Herbert John Cecil Kouts (December 18, 1919 – January 7, 2008) was an American nuclear physicist and engineer, a pioneer in nuclear safety, director of nuclear reactor safety research at the Atomic Energy Commission.
Kouts was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1978 "for contributions in nuclear engineering, especially physical principles and safety of nuclear power reactors and nuclear materials safeguards".
Kouts received the Atomic Energy Commission's Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1963.Born in Bisbee, Arizona, Kouts attended Ball High School in Galveston, Texas from 1933 to 1935 and graduated from C. E. Byrd High School in Shreveport, Louisiana in June 1936. He then attended Louisiana State University, earning a B.A. degree in mathematics in June 1941 and continuing graduate studies until January 1942. He was commissioned in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1942 and then served as an airborne radar specialist in the Army Air Forces until 1945. After World War II, Kouts returned to Louisiana State in September 1945 and completed an M.S. degree in physics in June 1946. He then attended Princeton University, receiving a Ph.D. degree in physics in January 1952. His doctoral thesis was entitled An investigation into certain features of the motion of a rigid charge distribution.Kouts died at Brookhaven Memorial Hospital in East Patchogue, New York from congestive heart failure and complications from a fall.