Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age: 1895-1965

**A Guardian Best Science and Nature Book of 2025**From the award-winning science writer, a new history of the development of nuclear power and the extraordinary minds behind itHenry Becquerel’s accidental discovery, in Paris in 1896, of a faint smudge on a photographic plate sparked a chain of discoveries which would unleash the atomic age. Destroyer of Worlds is the story of how pursuit of this hidden source of nuclear power, which began innocently and collaboratively, was overwhelmed by the politics of the 1930s, and following devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the way to a still more terrible possibility: a thermonuclear bomb, the so-called “backyard weapon”, that could destroy all life on earth - from anywhere. The story spans decades and continents, moving from Becquerel to Ernest Rutherford, the Cambridge-based, New Zealand scientist who first split the atom, expands to include Enrico Fermi in Rome, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in Berlin and the Joliot-Curies in Paris, l