One afternoon in 1942, in a squash court beneath the stands of University of Chicago’s football stadium, a group of scientists watched as Enrico Fermi coaxed the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction from a pile of dusty carbon bricks, unlocking the enormous energetic possibilities of the atom’s nucleus, completing Manhattan Project’s mission the construction of a war winning atom bomb. There’s no satisfactory answer to the risks of nuclear conflict, those consequences that gave physicist Eugene Wigner an eerie feeling. Destroyer of the Worlds is the story of how pursuit of this hidden source of nuclear power, which began … Continue reading Pursuit of hidden source of nuclear power