Albert L. Latter

[1] Immediately after receiving his Ph.D. he joined the Santa Monica headquarters of RAND Corporation, where for the next twenty years he worked on nuclear weapons.

[4][5] An American delegate to the 1959 nuclear test ban negotiations in Geneva, Latter studied seismic detection, which helped lead to the U.S. approval of the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963.He was the first American scientist to theorize that high-yield nuclear devices will emit a large fraction of their energy as high temperature X-rays, a discovery that demonstrated the vulnerability of offensive and defensive strategic missiles.

Latter became head of the physics department at Rand, where the aspects of nuclear weapons he dealt with ranged from their design and efficiency to defensive steps against them.

He also played a significant role in developing certain advanced missile warheads and in devising ways to detect underground nuclear tests.

[7] In 1971 Albert Latter resigned from RAND[1] and, together his brother Richard and most of RAND's physics department,[7] founded in Marina del Rey the defense research company R&D Associates (RDA) which was acquired in 1983 by Logicon Inc.,[1] which became a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman in 1997.