On this day, a message was sent from Chicago: “The Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.” Washington asked: “Were the natives friendly?” Before translating this from the Aesopian language of encryption, let’s recall that in the spring of that year Enrico Fermi, a Nobel laureate and physicist, arrived in Chicago, where work on the so-called Manhattan Project was taking place. The group that he led built the first nuclear reactor beneath the stand of the university stadium. On December 2, Signor Enrico successfully set fire to an uranium pot: 6 tons of uranium, 315 tons of graphite, and something else produced a self-sustaining controlled nuclear chain reaction, which he reported to the White House.

The same year Fermi and twelve other Nobel laureates began the process of creating nuclear weapons.