ABSTRACT
The discovery of nuclear fission at the end of 1938 presented some scientists with a modern counterpart to Pandora’s Box. Even on the eve of the discovery of nuclear fission the matter was chewed over again, this time by H. C. Dickinson, chief of the US National Bureau of Standards’ Heat and Power Division. Many technical aspects of the discovery of nuclear fission and the early exploration of the phenomenon have been described elsewhere. The discovery of fission-and its almost immediate recognition as a likely mechanism for “harnessing the atom”-came as a shock. Shortly after Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity in 1896, considered then an inexplicable outpouring of energy from uranium atoms, Marie and Pierre Curie found that the purified radium compounds they had separated were self-luminous. The colleague published Ernest Rutherford’s remark, calling it a “nightmare dream of the scientific imagination,” but useful to illustrate the vistas created by the discovery of radioactivity.
