COMMENTARY

building the pile in mid-November. “These neighborhood people played a vital role in assembling the pile,” Lamb said. “They did it in two weeks, working around the clock.”

On the morning of December 2, 1942, the experiment commenced. By afternoon—after an eleventh-hour, Fermi-ordered lunch break— they had reached a sustained nuclear reaction. They’d proven that a nuclear bomb was possible, and, importantly, that it wouldn’t require huge amounts of uranium.

“So, two things happened: right away they moved the pile out to site A at [suburban] Argonne Forest. That’s how Argonne, soon after that, became an o cial laboratory of the government and a pioneer in nuclear medicine.”

The other thing that happened was that Oppenheimer picked a remote mesa he knew from attending a New Mexico boys’ school as the site for the full-scale development of the bomb.