The Ultimate Weapon: the Atomic Bomb

Abstract

Soon after the beginning of the twentieth century scientists began to speculate that the atom, being a source of energy, might be used as a weapon of war. In 1904 the Canadian physicist, Frederick Soddy, a onetime colleague of Rutherford, wrote that atomic energy only awaited a ‘suitable detonator to cause the earth to resort to chaos’. In 1922, four years after the First World War, F. W. Aston, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry, caused a minor sensation when he asserted that should atomic energy ever be released in a practical form ‘the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dreams of scientific fiction.’¹ Other scientists were sceptical, however. Rutherford, despite his experiments in artificially disintegrating the atom in 1919, to the end of his life pooh-poohed claims made for atomic energy as being no more than ‘moonshine’.