James L. Tuck

James L. Tuck
James Tuck's ID badge photo from Los Alamos
Born	(1910-01-09)9 January 1910 Manchester
Died	15 December 1980(1980-12-15) (aged 70)

James Leslie Tuck OBE, (9 January 1910 – 15 December 1980) was a British physicist. He was born in Manchester, England, and educated at the Victoria University of Manchester. Because of his involvement with the Manhattan Project, he was unable to submit his thesis on time and never received his doctoral degree.

In 1937 he was offered an appointment as a Salter Research Fellow at Oxford University, where he worked with Leó Szilárd on particle accelerators.

At the outbreak of World War II, he was appointed as the scientific advisor to Frederick Alexander Lindemann, who was on the private staff of Winston Churchill. His research included work on shaped charges, used in anti-tank weapons. For this work he received the Order of the British Empire from King George VI.

His expertise on shaped charges led to his being sent to Los Alamos, where he was a member of the British delegation to the Manhattan Project and helped in the development of explosive lensing and the Urchin initiator[1]. This work was crucial to the success of the plutonium atomic bomb.