Darol Froman

Darol Kenneth Froman (October 23, 1906 – September 11, 1997) was an American physicist who served as the deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1951 to 1962. He served as a group leader from 1943 to 1945, and a division head from 1945 to 1948. He was the scientific director of the Operation Sandstone nuclear tests at Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific in 1948, and assistant director for weapons development from 1949 to 1951.

Early life Darol Kenneth Froman was born in Harrington, Washington, on October 23, 1906, the son of a farmer. His family moved to Canada in 1910. He entered the University of Alberta in Edmonton, which awarded him the degrees of Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in 1926 and Master of Science (M.Sc.) the following year.

After graduating from the University of Chicago, Froman became a lecturer at the University of Alberta from 1930 to 1931, and was lecturer and assistant professor of physics at Macdonald College at McGill University in Montreal from 1931 to 1939.

Later life Froman remained at Los Alamos after the war, replacing Bacher as head of G Division (now renamed M Division) in 1945. In 1948, he was the scientific director of the Operation Sandstone nuclear tests at Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific. He was assistant director for weapons development from 1949 to 1951. He served as the associate technical director, later renamed deputy director, from 1951 until he retired in 1962. As such he was second only to the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Norris E. Bradbury, and he worked closely with Bradbury, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam on the design of the hydrogen bomb. He was also heavily involved with Project Rover, the project to develop a nuclear thermal rocket. Froman was married with two daughters, Kay and Eva. He died in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 11, 1997.

In 2009, Danny B. Stillman, a former head of intelligence at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Thomas C. Reed, a weapons designer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a Secretary of the Air Force, published a book titled The Nuclear Express, in which they presented unsubstantiated allegations that an unnamed American scientist, easily identified as Froman, was a KGB spy who gave the Teller-Ulam design to the Soviet Union. "The allegation that Froman was a spy", noted Robert Norris, "is likely to come as surprise to his colleagues and to many others".