List No. 125

WE’RE COOKIN!

Richard Watts

December 2nd, 1942

From 1939 until 1945, fearful that the Germans would get there first, an enormous team of scientists led by the US spent billions of dollars in a race to build the first atomic bomb, in a scheme named the Manhattan Project. A major development came in 1942, when physicists successfully orchestrated the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction – an experiment during which Richard Watts listed the on-going results in his notebook. The page seen here shows the very moment when fission occurred, labelled “We’re Cookin!”

The project concluded three years after these lists were written, when two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Over 200,000 people perished.