In 1939, the Manhattan Project began with an experiment and a meeting at Columbia University. Hungarian-born physicist, Leo Szilard, has advanced beyond the recent splitting of the atom — which was believed to have no practical application — and discovers the next step in physics that will make atomic energy and a bomb imminently possible. Szilard must convince his colleague, Enrico Fermi, and the Physics Dean, George Pegram, to keep their nuclear research secret and protect the world from a technology that could end all human life