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Meitner’s findings became a tipping point in the development of nuclear weapons, but as the world once more moved into war, it was the Germans who held the potential key to nuclear power. While in Sweden, Meitner identified and named the process of nuclear fission. However, the antisemitism of the Nazi party forced Meitner, who was Jewish, to flee and settle in Sweden. On the heels of these developments, Austrian-Swedish physicist Lise Meitner, working with German chemist Otto Hahn, was among the first to achieve the successful fission of uranium. The following year, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi unknowingly split neutrons within uranium while conducting his own experiments. Hungarian-German physicist Leo Szilard conceived the possibility of self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions, or a nuclear chain reaction, in 1933. The 1930s saw further development in the field. Building from this research, British physicist Ernest Rutherford in 1911 formulated a model of the atom in which low-mass electrons orbited a charged nucleus that contained the bulk of the atom’s mass. Curie’s discovery of radioactivity in elements forever changed the nature of atomic science. Curie created the term “radioactive” to describe the emission of electromagnetic particles from disintegrating atoms. As Marie Curie was conducting her groundbreaking research on uranium in the late nineteenth century, she found that the element was naturally radioactive. Beginning in 1789, when German scientist Martin Klaproth discovered the dense, metallic element he called uranium, exploration of atomic energy and radiation came to fascinate scientific minds. Achieving the monumental goal of splitting the nucleus of an atom, known as nuclear fission, came through the development of scientific discoveries that stretched over several centuries.