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Chain Reaction: The Day Nuclear Fire Was First Unleashed
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi triggered the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction beneath a Chicago squash court — and the atomic bomb became inevitable. This episode follows the fear, secrecy, and physics that drove the Manhattan Project from Einstein's letter to the moment the chain reaction wouldn't stop.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what they didn't know on the morning of December second, nineteen forty-two. They didn't know if it would work.
To understand December second, you have to go back three years. To a letter.
By nineteen forty-two, the project had a name, a budget, and a general. General Leslie Groves was not a scientist.
But before Los Alamos could build a bomb, someone had to prove the underlying physics actually worked at scale. That was Fermi's job.
Proving a chain reaction was one thing. Building a weapon was something else entirely.
By July of nineteen forty-five, the implosion device was ready to test. Oppenheimer named it the Gadget.
Three weeks later, on August sixth, nineteen forty-five, the uranium bomb known as Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. Approximately one hundred thousand people died.
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