For once Compton made a quick decision: with control seemingly assured, he allowed Fermi to build CP-1 in the west stands. He chose not to inform the president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, reasoning that he should not ask a lawyer to judge a matter of nuclear physics. “The only answer he could have given would have been—no. And this answer would have been wrong. So I assumed the responsibility myself.”
