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’.