Thomas Lee Neff[1] (September 25, 1943 – July 11, 2024) was an American physicist.
He played a major role in the Megatons to Megawatts Program that dismantled thousands of nuclear warheads.
As a post-doc, he was an assistant to American Physical Society President Wolfgang "Pief" Panofsky and helped write legislation that created the US Department of Energy.
Neff is credited with dreaming up the Megatons to Megawatts Program and selling the idea to the governments of the USA and post-Soviet Russia.
The program solved the problem of how to shrink the USSR's large nuclear weapons stockpile and keep weapons-grade uranium from being sold to America's enemies.