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

A Guardian Best Book of the Year

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 bega...