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Nuclear Weapons of the Atomic AgeOn September 26, 1905, a German scientific journal, Annalen der Physik, published a paper titled %u201cZur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper.%u201d Translated into English, it was, %u201cOn the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.%u201d The author was Albert Einstein. Einstein's paper included what became the world's most famous equation, E=mc%u00b2. It was a simple formula, but it transformed our view of the universe. At the time, the 26-year-old Einstein was working six days a week as a Class 3 Clerk in a Berne Switzerland Patent Office. Unbelievably, it was just one of five remarkable papers he published in that single year. Little wonder that 1905 became known as his annus mirabilis%u2014his remarkable year. This new body of work marked the beginning of a brand new era%u2014the Atomic Age.A New Source of EnergyEinstein%u2019s paper discussed the Theory of Special Relativity, and E=mc%u00b2 defined the relationship between energy (E), mass (m), and the speed of light (c). Because the speed of light (c) was such a large number, squaring it (c%u00b2) would yield an enormous number. And when that huge number was multiplied by a small amount of mass (m), it would result in a vast amount energy (E). In other words, Einstein was saying that mass and energy were equivalent, they could be converted into each other, and a small amount of mass would contain a tremendous amount of energy. This eventually led to an important question: Could human beings figure out how to release that latent energy? In 1913, a German scientist, Max Bodenstein, showed that some chemical reactions released unstable, extra particles. These particles were reactive, and would keep a reaction going that would otherwise stop. This was known as a chain reaction. Twenty-years later, on September 12, 1933, a Hungarian scientist, Leo Szilard, was struck by an idea%u2014if a chemical chain reaction could occur, then maybe a nuclear chain reaction was also possible. This was a revolutionary thought, and it occurred to him while waiting for a red light to change in London.In time, Szilard worked out a way to control a nuclear chain reaction so it would produce useful energy without causing a violent explosion. Then he designed a nuclear reactor where such a controlled reaction could take place%u2014and he filed a patent for it in 1934. But it wasn't until December 2, 1942 that he, Enrico Fermi, and several colleagues actually built one%u2014under the west viewing stand of the University of Chicago's Stagg Football Field. The device was called Chicago Pile 1.The Chicago reactor was but a small step toward today%u2019s modern nuclear-power reactors. In fact, it had no radiation shielding, nor a cooling sysA Brief History of The BombAlbert Einstein was only in his 20s when he came up with the formula E-mc%u00b2.The world%u2019s first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile 1, was built with 385 tons of graphite, 40 tons of uranium oxide, and 6 tons of uranium metal.