We were discovering something that not even God had created before us. Because those conditions hadn’t existed elsewhere in the universe; fission is commonplace in the heart of stars or massive celestial engines, but we achieved it inside a little sphere of metal, just a meter and a half in diameter, holding an even tinier core of just six kilograms of plutonium nestled within. It still amazes me that we could do something like that. So it wasn’t just the frantic race to beat the Nazis (and later the Russians, and then the Chinese, and so on and so forth till the world’s end), it was the joy
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