In 1939, Albert Einstein penned a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt. The letter was instigated, and largely written, by Hungarian immigrant and physicist Leo Szilard, who was concerned with the technological aims of the Nazi regime. After hearing the eminent British physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford dismiss the idea of obtaining useful energy from nuclear reactions, the unimpressed Szilard conceived the idea of the nuclear chain reaction, which eventually led to the development of both nuclear reactors and nuclear bombs.
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