Nuclear chain reaction the last one called ""Perfectionnement aux charges explosives"" was the first patent for the atomic bomb and is filed as patent n°445686 by the Caisse nationale de Recherche Scientifique. In parallel, Szilárd and Enrico Fermi in New York made the same analysis. This discovery prompted the letter from Szilárd and signed by Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning of the possibility that Nazi Germany might be attempting to build an atomic bomb. On December 2, 1942, a team led by Enrico Fermi produced the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction with the Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) experimental reactor in
Nuclear reactor new type of reactor using uranium came from the discovery by Lise Meitner, Fritz Strassmann and Otto Hahn in 1938 that bombardment of uranium with neutrons (provided by an alpha-on-beryllium fusion reaction, a "neutron howitzer") produced a barium residue, which they reasoned was created by the fissioning of the uranium nuclei. Subsequent studies in early 1939 (one of them by Szilárd and Fermi) revealed that several neutrons were also released during the fissioning, making available the opportunity for the nuclear chain reaction that Szilárd had envisioned six years previously. On 2 August 1939 Albert Einstein signed a letter to President