Solomon "Solly" Zuckerman, Baron Zuckerman was a Britishpublic servant, zoologist and operational research pioneer. He is best remembered as a scientific advisor to the Allies on bombing strategy in the Second World War, for his work to advance the cause of nuclear non-proliferation, and for his role in bringing attention to global economic issues.
During the Second World War, Zuckerman worked on several research projects for the British Government, including the design of a civilian defence helmet and measuring the effect of bombing on people and buildings and an assessment of the bombardment of the Italian island of Pantelleria in 1943. He was thus one of the pioneers of the science of operational research. He was given an honorary commission as a wing commander in the Administrative and Special Duties Branch of the Royal Air Force on 13 May 1943, and promoted to honorary group captain on 20 September 1943. Zuckerman's suggestion, made when he was Scientific Director of the British Bombing Survey Unit, and accepted by Air Chief MarshalArthur Tedder and Supreme Allied Commander U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower in the lead-up to the Normandy landings, that the Allies concentrate on disrupting the German-controlled French transportation system through heavy aerial bombing of rail lines and marshalling yards, was officially called the Transportation Plan, but was privately referred to by its opponents as "Zuckerman's Folly". A focus of Zuckerman's plan, learned in Italy, was to target locomotives and the capacity to service them due to a shortage in France prior to the Normandy campaign. This had the effect of pushing rail heads back from the front causing trucks to be diverted from a role of manoeuvre to one of logistics, which resulted in greater petrol consumption.
Later career
After the war, Zuckerman was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath in the 1946 New Year Honours. He left the Royal Air Force on 1 September 1946, and was then Professor of Anatomy at the University of Birmingham until 1968, chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence from 1960 to 1966, and chief scientific adviser to the British Government from 1964 to 1971. He was also a member of a Royal Commission investigating environmental pollution from 26 February 1970. In 1951 Zuckerman published his paper summarizing the existing data both for and against the possibility of postnatal oogenesis. He taught at the University of East Anglia from 1969 to 1974, where he was involved in setting up a school of environmental sciences. He served as Secretary of the London Zoological Society from 1955 to 1977 and as its President from 1977 to 1984. Some of Zuckerman's achievements include being a pioneer in the study of primate behaviour. He is also credited for making science a normal part of government policy in the Western world. His more notable publications include The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes published in 1931, and Scientists and War in 1966. Zuckerman wrote two volumes of autobiography: From Apes to Warlords and Monkeys Men and Missiles.
He met his future wife, Lady Joan Rufus Isaacs, daughter of Gerald Isaacs, 2nd Marquess of Reading, in Oxford. They married in 1939 and had two children, a son, Paul, and a daughter, Stella. Stella Zuckerman died in 1992, predeceasing her parents. Lady Joan Zuckerman died in 2000. Martha Gellhorn described Zuckerman in a letter written to his wife Joan in 1993, shortly after Zuckerman died in London following a heart attack, aged 88:
