THE role Winnie the Pooh played in the atomic bombing of Japan is not widely known. But when Enrico Fermi achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on 2 December 1942 – a key step on the way to the bomb – the first to know about it were Pooh, and Piglet, and the Heffalump. These, it turns out, were the names given by Fermi to the Geiger counters that registered the radiation surge when the reactor under the west stand of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field stadium suddenly went “critical”.
This bizarre detail I gleaned from Fermi Remembered, a lively…
