On December 2, 1946, the fourth anniversary of the Chicago Pile-1 going critical, scientists who participated in the experiment posed for a photograph on the steps of Eckhart Hall. Leona Marshall Libby was the only woman in the photo.
Narrator: One year after the end of World War II, some of the Met Lab’s leading scientists had a reunion. On the steps of Eckhart Hall, physicist Leona Marshall Libby stands out as the only woman. She was one of Enrico Fermi’s closest associates.
Leona Marshall Libby: He was a marvelously wise director of the scientific effort in the sense that he knew exactly where to be careful, and he could very frequently guess when it was unnecessary to make more accurate measurements. He had a very good sense of the degree of effort that would give the required result.
Narrator: Leona was also an outspoken defender of the work on an atomic weapon. In an interview, she recalled that Manhattan Project scientists feared that Hitler’s scientists were two years ahead in the race to create the atomic bomb.
Leona Marshall Libby: I think everyone was terrified that the Germans were ahead of us. That was a persistent and ever-present fear, fed, of course, by the fact that our leaders knew those people in Germany.
They led the civilized world of physics at the time the war set in, at every major university. So they were terrified. If they had gotten it before we did, I don’t know what would have happened to the world, but something different. Very frightening time.