We learn of Curie’s scandalous affairs and that Rutherford did not like kidneys for breakfast

We learn of Curie’s scandalous affairs, and that Rutherford did not like kidneys for breakfast. Chadwick had a weak stomach which could not tolerate oysters and Otto Hahn, whose English was not very good, had a tendency towards malapropisms which offended the sensibilities of polite young ladies. These trivialities are obviously intended to give texture to the human story of the bomb but, before long, because of their ubiquity they’re about as welcome as ants at a picnic.The great fault of this book is that it is loaded with detail but lacking in depth. As Diana Preston argues in Before the Fall-out, the common feature of the atomic scientists was that they were all “only human”.Preston describes what she calls the “human chain reaction” which started with Marie Curie’s discovery of radium in 1903 and ended with the destruction of Hiroshima, 42 years later. Her book is about people – rightly so, since the building of the atom bomb was, first and foremost, a triumph of human intelligence, creativity and will.

But na?t?s a weakness which arises from the assumption that the world is a better place than in fact it is. Ernest Rutherford, the first man to “split” the atom, went to his grave in 1937 believing that those who spoke of exploiting nuclear energy were “talking moonshine”.The life story of the atom bomb is a morality tale, a chronicle of innocence lost. Those who started out in seemingly innocuous arcane research became servants of the state, building deadly weapons. Within the atom enormous power lurked, and all nations are covetous of power.It is easy, knowing what we do now, to criticise the scientists who opened the Pandora’s Box of nuclear research They seem na? and irresponsible. It is something which – unlike him – we shall never be able to get rid of.”

Langevin was more perceptive than the average physicist of his generation.

For most of his colleagues, the real world was an abstraction. Robert Oppenheimer, for instance, apparently did not know of the Great Depression until around 1935. It was perhaps dangerous for men so detached from life, and so young, to meddle with atoms. But the nuclear physicists considered themselves theoreticians, not engineers.
They were not building a bomb; merely musing on the structure of the atom. They thought they could ignore nation states since their first loyalty was to science. To most of them, their research seemed as harmless as that of a mathematician who searches for higher and higher prime numbers. The Frenchman Paul Langevin thought the tiny particle bigger than Adolf Hitler.