Years before Robert Oppenheimer led the Los Alamos lab that developed the first nuclear weapons, physicists in Washington, D.C., thrust the world into the atomic age — inside a narrow, zigzagging tunnel running underneath Chevy Chase. It happened at the Carnegie Institute of Science's "atom smasher" in 1939. On the show, institute librarian, Shaun Hardy, and president, Eric Isaacs, tell this little known and unlikely D.C. story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices