He had ties to the Manhattan Project at Chicago and Oak Ridge, and worked with Samuel Allison and James Van Allen.
[4][5] In addition to Allison, Smith worked with physicist Lester Skaggs to design an aircraft proximity detection system that utilized radio waves to locate and detonate anti-aircraft shells.
Following the outbreak of World War II, Smith obtained a position at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.
[6] As a civilian scientist, he was assigned to the Army Air Force in England, and planned railway targets for airstrikes in support of D-Day.
)'s Division of Biology and Medicine, and performed calculations to determine the theoretical number of atomic bomb detonations necessary to achieve significant radiation exposure and radioactive material fallout.
He reached the conclusion that: Sr-90 is by far the most hazardous isotope resulting from nuclear detonations, and that the distribution of this isotope over large areas of the earth's surface constitutes the limiting factor in estimating the long-range hazard from the use of a large number of atomic bombs.In 1952, the RAND Corporation completed a study of Project GABRIEL, and was charged with analyzing the short term characteristics of nuclear fallout.
[20] In 1971, Smith founded TELIMIS Corporation, based in Springfield, Virginia, a company that developed applications in computer technology.