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

[2] 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.

[3][4] 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.

Earlier in 1972 he had published a review in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of the book Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Frontiers of Public and Private Science by Solly Zuckerman.

From the late 1960s onwards Tuck took a keen interest in the phenomenon of ball lightning, probably because of the connection between plasmas and their role in fusion power schemes.

[12] In 1980 he appeared in the Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World episode 'Clarke's Cabinet of Curiosities' where he described his experiments at Los Alamos, carried out during lunch breaks, to create ball lightning using a large storage battery of the type then used in submarines.