The Day the Atomic Age Was Born

A dramatic eyewitness account of the world's first nuclear chain reaction

- BY Herbert L. Anderson, AS TOLD TO J. D. Ratcliff

THE EVENTS THAT HAVE changed man's destiny-the invention of the stone ax, the discovery of fire, the drift into the Industrial Revolution-few can be pinpointed in time. But one, possibly the greatest of all, can be timed to the minute. At 3:36 p.m. on 2 December 1942, the world entered the Atomic Age. And I was one of 40-odd witnesses.

The setting was hardly auspicious: a bleak, drafty, dimly lighted squash court under the abandoned and crumbling stadium at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field. There, within a pile of uranium and graphite bricks the size of a small house, neutrons were being born by the billion each second and hurled out at velocities of 29,000 kilometres a second. Every one that hit the heart of another uranium atom shattered that atom to produce two neutrons.

Thus, every few minutes, the silent, violent storm was doubling itself in history's first nuclear chain reaction. We were too awed to speak. The silence was broken only by the staccato rattle of counters keeping track of neutron production.

All our advance reasoning indicated that we were safe. Yet we were pushing into territory never before explored.

There was at least a chance that the pile would get out of control; that we would be destroyed and a large, thickly settled portion of Chicago would be converted into a radioactive wasteland.

Would this, in fact, be doomsday?

To Tickle a Mosquito

SCIENCE SOMETIMES moves at a plodding pace. But, with atomic fission, events had moved at breakneck speed. Only four years before, at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, nuclear chemist Otto Hahn and his young assistant, Fritz Strassmann, had bombarded uranium with neutrons from an external source.