Washington, DC, United States. After receiving an introductory letter from physics professor George Pergram, Admiral Stanford Hooper of the US Navy meets with Enrico Fermi, who informs him of the possibility of using a new explosive (uranium) with a power a million times greater than conventional explosives. The meeting doesn’t get off to a good start: a listless employee announces to the group, “There’s a spaghetti outside.” Fermi speaks for over an hour. He describes the advantage of slow neutrons and the concept of critical mass, and says he doesn’t know how large it is, adding, with a hint of skepticism and to avoid raising expectations, that “perhaps it will be the size of a small star.” The presentation enthuses Ross Grunn, director of research for the US Navy, who immediately sees a source of energy for submarines. Priority instead goes to the bomb, and only after the end of the war will a nuclear submarine program be launched. As for the bomb, activity was not frenetic, to put it mildly: $1,500 was allocated to continue research into fission. Fermi did not design the actual bomb, which instead saw the essential contributions of other scientists such as Oppenheimer, Kistiakowsky, von Neumann, Alvarez, Segrè, Serber, Bainbridge, Feynman, Neddermeyer, and Szilard. But Fermi was the most knowledgeable person on the planet regarding neutron physics. By agreeing to work on the chain reaction triggered by slow neutrons, Fermi, along with Szilard, made history: he made the bomb possible and brought humanity into the atomic age. The Manhattan Project was not only the beginning of secret science, but also of Big Science, funded by governments on an ever-larger scale.
