Atomic Bombing: America's Only Choice It was discovered at the University of Chicago that neutrons striking the element uranium caused the atoms to split apart. The discovery, based on Einstein's E=mc2 theory that mass has the potential to unleash great amounts of raw energy, showed tha...

In the 1930s, some scientists theorized that bombarding an atom's nucleus with a neutron from another atom would cause the first atom to split in two. The splitting atom would release another neutron, which would then strike a neighboring atom, causing it to split, and so on. It was thought that ea...