also identified "villains" in the previous Australian and British administrations. As a senior witness Penney bore the brunt of the allegations, and his health was badly affected by the experience. He was diagnosed with cancer in 1991, and died on 3 March 1991 at his home in the village of East Hendred, aged 81. He burned his personal papers before he died. In Penney's obituary in the New York Times he was credited as the "father of the British bomb". The Guardian described him as its "guiding light" and his scientific and administrative leadership was said to be crucial in its successful and timely creation. His leadership of the team that exploded the first British hydrogen bomb at Christmas Island was instrumental in restoring the exchange of nuclear technology between Britain and the US in 1958, and he was credited as playing a leading part in the negotiations which led to the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963. His Kronig-Penney model for the behaviour of an electron in a periodic potential is still taught and used today in solid-state physics and is used to explain the origin of band gaps. Notes References External links The Penney Report (1947); WikiLeaks. 1909 births 1991 deaths English nuclear physicists Manhattan Project people People associated with the nuclear weapons programme of the United Kingdom Academics of Imperial College London Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Alumni of Imperial College London Rectors of Imperial College London People from Oxfordshire People from Sheerness Alumni of the University of London Members of the Order of Merit Harkness Fellows Recipients of the Medal of Freedom Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire Life peers Life peers created by Elizabeth II Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences People associated with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 20th-century English mathematicians Members of the American Philosophical Society