A graduate of City College of New York and Columbia University, Havens worked with James Rainwater on the construction of a neutron spectrometer, which became the subject of his doctoral thesis.
During World War II he worked on the Manhattan Project, the effort to create the first atomic bombs, in its Substitute Alloy Materials (SAM) Laboratories.
Fellow graduate students in physics at the time included James Rainwater, Herbert L. Anderson and George Weil.
[1] The physics faculty at Columbia were drawn into what became the Manhattan Project, the effort to create the first atomic bombs, which accelerated after the United States entered World War II in December 1941.
They analyzed samples of uranium that Robert R. Wilson's team at Princeton University had attempted to separate the isotopes using a device called the "isotron".
Those that remained at Columbia became the Substitute Alloy Materials (SAM) Laboratories, under the direction of Harold Urey, which was mainly concerned with isotope separation for uranium enrichment.
Havens and Rainwater also devised a means of measuring residual hydrogen in fluorocarbons, a subject of great interest because uranium hexafluoride gas was being considered for use in isotope separation processes.
[1][8][9] Havens spent the rest of his career at Columbia University, where he became a full professor in 1955, and was its director of nuclear science and engineering from 1961 to 1977.
The project eventually evolved into the Materials Test Accelerator at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory; but it never served its intended purpose, as uranium was found to not be a scarce as first thought.
Havens pressed the AEC to release more information on neutron cross-sections, but was thwarted by its chairman, Lewis Strauss,[11][12] who explained, "We’ve got to keep something secret".
[13] In 1985, Havens retired from Columbia and became the first full-time CEO of the American Physical Society (APS), the largest professional physicists' body in the world.