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of The World Set Free, Wells’s prediction of fission, nuclear power, and atomic bombs. Leo Szilard had enjoyed the book but thought it ‘moonshine’; now he thought again. In January 1939, just after reading the Hahn-Strassmann article and having heard about Frisch and Meitner’s forthcoming piece in Nature, he wrote to Lewis Strauss, a wealthy Jewish-American financier with a longstanding affection for physics and a particular determination to produce radium for treating patients with cancer, from which his parents had recently died. Szilard alerted Strauss to the two revolutionary articles. Their conclusions, he wrote, ‘might lead to a large-scale production of energy and radioactive elements, unfortunately also perhaps to atomic bombs’. Thereafter Szilard wrote often to Strauss, whom he viewed, accurately as it turned out, as a potential patron and sufficiently well connected to serve as a conduit between the physics community and the politically powerful.38

There is no indication that Szilard had meanwhile encountered another futuristic novel, this one published in 1933 by Harold Nicolson, the husband of Vita Sackville-West and biographer of Tennyson, Lord Byron, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Nicolson had joined the diplomatic service in 1909 and was a member of the British delegation at Versailles, edited the newspaper of Oswald Mosley’s New Party until Mosley announced his Fascism, and stood for election to Parliament in 1931 (a loss) and then in 1935 (a victory). His novel, entitled Public Faces, brought together Nicolson’s interests in literature, diplomacy, and politics, and the role of gossip in all three. The book pretends that, in the summer of 1935, a geologist from Nottingham named James Livingstone discovered, on the Persian Gulf island of Abu Saad, a strange new ore that he called ‘Deposit A’. Livingstone speculated that the ore, if in sufficient quantity and refined to its ‘pure state’, would immediately ‘transmute itself’ so violently that it would explode, eradicating everyone and everything ‘within a considerable range’. This ‘atomic bomb’, as scientists in the know had quietly begun to call it, no bigger than a parliamentarian’s inkstand, might be powerful enough to destroy a major city.

The liberal members of Prime Minister Spencer Furnivall’s Cabinet, including the ineffectual foreign secretary Walter Bullinger, are appalled at this news, but there is far worse to come. As it happens, Sir Charles Pantry—Sir Charles Portal?—the secretary of state for air, has taken it upon himself to arrange, with the government of India, the excavation and removal from Abu Saad of most of Deposit A. It took very little—‘some coolie detachments from Bombay and a few tankers’, says Pantry offhandedly—to procure this ore, and to leave almost none of it for anyone else. Deposit A was found to be useful for building rocket planes that were light and fast and strong enough to carry Deposit A-based atomic bombs. And, by the way, the Air Ministry had already built eleven rocket planes, and the first test of an atomic bomb to be delivered by one of the planes was scheduled for the upcoming Sunday at dawn.

Pantry is beyond control, or at least Bullinger and rest of the dithering Furnivall Cabinet cannot stop him. Assuming that the circumference of the bomb’s explosion will not be wider than 30 miles, Air Ministry officials authorize its release into the North Atlantic, apparently at a safe distance from any ship and all land masses. But they have miscalculated its power. The bomb creates a tidal wave and an enormous bank of white steam so hot that it scalds to death an underdressed observation plane pilot who flies too close. The wave sinks the British aircraft carrier Albatross, whence the rocket plane flew, the American cruiser Omaha, and SS Calanares of the United Fruit Company. And it inundates Charleston and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, killing 80,000 people. In his explanation of the disaster, the Prime Minister admits that ‘the destructive range of this bomb had been seriously underestimated’, indeed, by a factor of