Nuclear security

A short history of nuclear fission

It began in 1789 when a German chemist named Martin Klaproth discovered uranium but it was not until 1934 that nuclear fission was first achieved following a series of experiments by Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist. 

The discovery opened the door to research by scientists around the world and in 1942 the first nuclear reactor was successfully tested at the University of Chicago.

Most early atomic research was focused on developing weapons for the second world war, under the code name Manhattan Project. On 6 August 1945 an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb immediately killed about 80,000 people and tens of thousands would later die of radiation exposure.