Suicide Squad (long)Shortly before 4 pm on December 2nd, 1942, physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard ushered in the Atomic Age with the world's first successful nuclear chain reaction.
Though the experiment (part of the race to develop nuclear weapons during World War II) was supposed to have been conducted in a forest preserve a safe distance (32 kilometres) southwest of Chicago, union workers went on strike. Researchers, with no time to waste, promptly set up shop on a squash court under the stands of University of Chicago's Stagg Field (the football stadium) in the city's posh Hyde Park suburb - without bothering to inform the university president of the move. "In the worst-case scenario an uncontrolled chain reaction was conceivable," it was later noted. "If it had taken place, it would have been goodbye Hyde Park."
Fermi and company did, however, implement certain "safety measures": three graduate students, for example, were enlisted to serve as a "suicide squad" - ready to avert a nuclear disaster by dumping pitchers of neutron-absorbing cadmium on the radioactive piles!
[The reactor's control rods (sticks of wood covered with cadmium) were withdrawn and the reactor was allowed to run briefly before being shut down. After "boiling the egg," the scientists celebrated by passing around a bottle of Champagne and paper cups. Szilard shook Fermi's hand, remarking that he thought the day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind.]
[Trivia: The reactor, which stood twenty feet tall, comprised 31 "piles" (built from 771,000 pounds of graphite, 80,590 pounds of uranium-oxide powder and 12,400 pounds of uranium metal). Slippery graphite dust caused 30 accidents and got into eyes, noses, ears, and mouths. Surgical masks were issued, but were rarely used. Why? They interfered with the researchers' smoking and singing.]
Fermi, Enrico (1901-1954) Italian-born American physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize (Physics, 1938) [noted for his work on artificial radioactivity caused by neutron bombardment, and for his production (at the University of Chicago in 1942) of the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in history]
[Sources: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; www]More Enrico Fermi anecdotesRelated Anecdote Keywords:
Last Resorts Science Physics Nuclear Weapons Experiments Precautions Meltdowns
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