- Date Of Birth: November 18, 1921
- Date Of Death: February 4, 2016
- State: Idaho
Warren Edwin Nyer died peacefully at his home in Idaho Falls on the night of Thursday, February 4, 2016, at the age of 94. He was the son of Carl John Nyer and Erna Wilhelmina E. (nee Michau) Nyer of Chicago, Illinois. He was born November 18, 1921, in Evanston, Illinois. He graduated from Tilden Technical High School in Chicago.
In 1941, Drs. Jesse and Compton hired him as the University of Chicago’s second work-study student. He was a low-level workman in the physics department. Among his duties were the dirty jobs of pressing uranium bricks and machining graphite blocks. He was a member of Enrico Fermi’s group and participated in the 1942 CP-1 criticality experiment. This experiment was the first controlled and self- sustaining release of nuclear energy by fission of uranium.
He married Henrietta Swickard at her father’s home in Newman, Illinois, on July 15, 1943. The couple was en route to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where Warren worked on the X-10 reactor. Moves to Hanford (1944) and Los Alamos (1945) followed. Henrietta witnessed the first atomic bomb test from the hills above Los Alamos. Warren participated in the test at the Alamogordo test site, at the observation station 10,000 yards south of ground zero.
They returned to Chicago in 1946 where Warren completed his bachelor’s degree, and was simultaneously associated with the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago. Their first son, Michael Morrow, was born in 1947 in Chicago. Later that year they returned to Los Alamos. In 1948, Warren participated in the sixth, seventh, and eighth atomic bomb explosions at Eniwetok Atoll. Their second son, Nicholas Carl, was born in 1949 in Los Alamos.
The family moved to Idaho Falls, Idaho, in November of 1951, where Warren was a physicist with the Materials Test Reactor (MTR) at the National Reactor Testing Station.
