Editorial, Il Fatto Quotidiano

The remarkable film “Oppenheimer” has rightly garnered a great deal of attention regarding the atomic bomb and the role of those who built it. Setting aside cinematic judgments about such a demanding and complex film, I would like to delve into the context of bomb construction and its implications. An aspect that was necessarily overlooked in the film is that the atomic bomb project was the culmination of forty years of revolutionary discoveries in physics. To narrow it down to the 1930s, we recall the discovery of the neutron by Chadwick in England, the discovery of artificial radioactivity by Joliot-Curie in France, the discovery of slow neutrons by Enrico Fermi and his team at Via Panisperna in Rome, the discovery of uranium fission by Hahn and Strassmann in Germany, and the discovery of plutonium along with uranium isotope separation in the United States. A fundamental part of the Manhattan Project was the extraordinary achievement in 1942: the production of a self-sustained and controlled nuclear fission chain reaction. This was the work of a team of scientists, with Fermi, “The Last Man Who Knew Everything,” as indicated in the title of a recent biography by D. Schwartz (Solferino), undoubtedly serving as the undisputed scientific leader.