Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age

The thrilling and terrifying seventy-year story--'kinetic, dramatic, and compulsively readable' (Patchen Barss)--of the physicists that deciphered the atom and created the hydrogen bomb Although Henri Becquerel didn't know it at the time, he changed history in 1896 when he left photographic plates and some uranium rocks in a drawer. The rocks emitted something that exposed the plates: it was the first documented evidence of spontaneous radioactivity. So began one of the most exciting and consequential efforts humans have ever undertaken. As Frank Close recounts in Destroyer of Worlds, scientists confronting Becquerel's discovery had three questions: What was this phenomenon? Could it be a source of unlimited power? And (alas), could it be a weapon? Answering them was an epic journey of discovery, with Ernest Rutherford, Enrico Fermi, Irene Joliot-Curie, and many others jockeying to decipher the dance of particles in a decaying atom. And it was a terrifying journey as well, as Edward