The first person to see that nuclear physicists would have to take account of the military implications of their work was Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist who had moved to Britain in 1933 to escape the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Szilard understood at once what fission might mean, for in 1933 he had hit upon the idea of a chain reaction as the way to release the energy bound up in the atomic nucleus. It had not occurred to him that a chain reaction might be possible in uranium, nor did he anticipate the discovery of fission, but he was sufficiently worried by the prospect of a nuclear
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