by James Hickman
Schiff Sovereign
If you saw Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Oppenheimer, you might remember the scene in which Dr. Oppenheimer travels to Chicago to meet with physicist Enrico Fermi, who had just achieved the world’s first ever self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.
This really happened– it was December 2, 1942, and Enrico Fermi’s experiment was a massive scientific breakthrough.
Fermi and his team proved that a fission reaction could be controlled… and therefore the vast amount of energy inside of an atom’s nucleus could be harnessed for other purposes.
Obviously, the US government was singularly focused on turning that immense nuclear energy into the biggest bomb the world had ever seen. But Fermi’s discovery also paved the way for nuclear power.