December 2 of 1942 was a critical day in the history of the twentieth century. On that day, Italian scientist Enrico Fermi, working under the stands of Stagg Field in Chicago, achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction in history. In an event fraught with meaning for the future safety of life on earth, Fermi created an “atomic pile” and allowed a sustained nuclear reaction to continue for a short time before extinguishing it.
That was the great secret Enrico Fermi revealed—that humans could gain the ability to control a nuclear reaction. The immediate concern this created was that whoever could weaponize this control first would have a weapon of enormous destructive power capable of obliterating entire cities.
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Italian scientist Enrico Fermi
Leading physicists such as Fermi had theorized about this possibility since 1938. The next year, they signed and had Albert Einstein deliver a letter to US President Franklin Roosevelt explaining the destructive potential should someone find a way to control a nuclear reaction. Roosevelt responded to the letter, and the fear that Nazi Germany might find a way to produce a nuclear weapon, by authorizing the Manhattan Project.
Lessons of Enrico Fermi’s Discovery
In time, scientists and others realized that although nuclear reactions had the potential for enormous destruction, they had other, more peaceful, uses as well. Nuclear reactors producing electricity started coming online in many countries within ten to fifteen years of Fermi’s discovery in Chicago. I’d rather not get into a discussion of the merits and demerits of nuclear power plants in this post. Suffice it to say that they have the potential to use nuclear reactions for nondestructive purposes.
Enrico Fermi’s story has another interesting lesson, however. His life is a great example of the drawbacks of racism and prejudice. He was Italian by birth, as mentioned above. His wife, however, was Jewish, and while Mussolini’s Italy was not quite so anti-Semitic as Nazi Germany, Fermi and his wife Laura hated fascism for its anti-Semitism. When Fermi won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1938, the couple traveled to Sweden for the ceremony. Afterward, they never returned to Italy, instead immigrating to the US. Fascism’s hatred of Jewish people proved the gain of the United States, and the free world in general.
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