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The History and Physics of the Atomic Bomb
First came the idea of splitting the atom; then, a chain of events leading to a moment forever etched in collective memory—the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Something else also happened in 1933: A Hungarian scientist of Jewish origins, Leo Szilard, who had fled to the United Kingdom to escape the Nazi regime, had an idea. In 1938, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who had fled to New York to escape fascism, discovered a material in which a process of this type occurred: uranium. Fearing that the Nazis might also discover this element’s capability of producing a chain reaction, the Manhattan Project was born in 1940, a secret program for the development of nuclear weapons led by Arthur Compton.
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