Dragon Experiment
On April 12th 1945 Otto Frisch, who coined the term Nuclear Fission back in 1939, later emigrated to the US to join the Manhattan project where he ran his "dragon" experiment. The experiment was to calculate the mass needed for Little Boy, by temporarily making a chain reaction—therefore "tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon".
Source: Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.
Public Domain
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Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!