[1] Kidder was born in New York City to father Harry Alvin, and lived in Manhattan as a young child, until he moved with his family to Riverside, Connecticut.
His father was a manager at the IRT Powerhouse in Manhattan, this plant powered much of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company subways until it was absorbed by the New York City Board of Transportation in 1940.
In 1960, Kidder worked with John Nuckolls and Stirling Colgate at Livermore to develop computer simulations for producing nuclear fusion in laser-compressed deuterium-tritium capsules.
[5][6] In 1979, Kidder was a witness for the defense in the United States v. The Progressive case, in which the U.S. Department of Energy sought to suppress the publication of a magazine article alleged to reveal the "secret of the hydrogen bomb".
[7] In 1997, Kidder argued against the Department of Energy's Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program, calling it "misguided in a number of ways", including introducing unnecessary changes in warhead materials, the cost of large-scale computational and experimental resources, and its effects on arms control efforts.