Having retired from his position as a research physicist at Harwell, Frank Close has carved out a niche for himself as the author of eminently readable and insightful science-inflected biographies of the ‘atomic spies’ who infiltrated the teams involved in the development of nuclear weapons in the West. Now, he has taken a step back to look at the history of the first part of the nuclear age, from the discovery of the structure of the atom to the explosion of the largest bomb ever constructed. There is nothing here that hasn’t been revealed before, but he tells the story very well. For anyone who wants an understanding of how nuclear weapons were invented, this is the ideal place to start.

Close brings out the personalities involved as well as the science, highlighting the false starts and dead ends that complicated progress, as well as the lucky breaks. But the science is front and centre: he provides lucid accounts of the experiments that enabled, for example, the discovery of the atomic nucleus itself (although there are a few lapses in lucidity, such as ‘key to this whole construction was the adoption of Pauli’s thesis that the electron is indeed accompanied by a neutral lightweight particle’).

Two of the participants in the story are worth highlighting. The German chemist Ida Noddack was probably the first person to suggest that a uranium nucleus might be broken into several fragments, but she was largely ignored. Although she is sometimes presented as the victim of misogyny in the scientific