Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age, Frank Close, Allen Lane, £25

There are few, if any, more significant before and after moments in history than 7.15 pm GMT on 31 October 1952. Before that time, humans could destroy and be destroyed by each other – by club, by spear, by gun, by bomb. After that time, we had achieved an entirely higher order of destructiveness – with a weapon that could kill not just humans but all humanity, along with every other organism on Earth. Anyone alive today cohabits the planet with this dread possibility. We live with the spectre of megadeaths.

At which point, some readers may be wondering whether there is a mistake above. The first detonation of a nuclear weapon, the Trinity test overseen by J. Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow Los Alamos scientists, was at 11.29 am GMT on 16 July 1945 – not on Halloween some seven years later. Surely that was when we, as a species, became, in Oppenheimer’s bastardisation of the Bhagavad Gita, a ‘destroyer of worlds’?

Not on Frank Close’s account in his new book, Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age. And it is a persuasive account. The date in 1952 marks the first successful detonation not of a nuclear weapon but of a thermonuclear weapon – or, as we know them, a hydrogen (or ‘H’) bomb. Here, in the Ivy Mike test overseen by several veterans of Los Alamos, particularly the obsessive Edward Teller, the fissile power of an atomic bomb was used as little more than a trigger for superheating hydrogen to the point that it undergoes fusion. This is the chemistry that goes on in the sun. Replicated terrestrially, it is cataclysmic.

As Close puts it, ‘Scientists who were present at both the Trinity and Ivy Mike tests recalled that the flash was far beyond what they had witnessed with that atomic bomb. It was clear that something was horribly wrong as soldiers briefly saw bones as shadows, like a Röntgen X-ray image but of the whole body and taken at a range of 20 miles.’ The mushroom cloud reached 80,000 feet. An entire island was vaporised. But the most terrifying thing was – is – the unfulfilled potential of such devices. Close quotes the contemporary nuclear physicist Herbert York: ‘Fission bombs, destructive as they might have been, were thought of [as] being limited in power. Now, it seemed, we had learned how… to build bombs whose power was boundless.’ In fact, Teller had worked up designs for an H-bomb that could feasibly kill everyone on Earth.

‘The Ivy Mike explosion marked a real change in history’, writes Close towards the end of his book, ‘a moment when the world moved to a more dangerous path, for the hydrogen bomb is not just a more powerful weapon; it is a true destroyer of worlds.’

Destroyer of Worlds culminates with the H-bomb; it does not begin with it. Close, both a distinguished particle physicist and an acclaimed writer (see his Trinity, among other titles), explains the structure of the book in that rarest of feats: an acknowledgements page that is worth reading. Apparently, his ten-year-old grandson asked him about the Tsar Bomba – a Soviet thermonuclear device that, five times bigger than Ivy Mike, is the most powerful ever detonated – not long before Close started receiving radiotherapy for cancer. These two poles of the radioactive world – the terrible, death-dealing forces and the wondrous, life-giving ones – were begging for exploration. So Close embarked on a history of our nuclear age, running from the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 to, effectively, Tsar Bomba itself in 1961.

The significance of this age should not go underappreciated. It is the first major contention of Close’s book that ‘there were three Industrial Revolutions’ – the first powered by steam, the second by electricity, and the third occurring when ‘we discovered how to release the vast reserves of energy locked within the nuclei of atoms’. Much like the thermonuclear bomb, this revolution contains a great amount of unfulfilled potential. What might be achieved by our comprehension of the subatomic realm! Yet, in one of the more unhappy accidents in history, some of the most significant developments in this realm – the ones that really made the bomb feasible – coincided almost exactly with the start of the Second World War. From that moment on, radiochemistry turned into an arms race.

Such is the history of the nuclear age – it is full of accidents, unhappy and otherwise. Most school students know the story of radioactivity’s discovery: while wondering at the source of Wilhelm Röntgen’s X-rays, the French scientist Henri Becquerel left some uranium crystals in a drawer with photographic plates and a Maltese Cross, believing that nothing would happen in the absence of sunlight. But something did happen – the uranium burnt a silhouette of the cross on to the plates by itself. Here was a hitherto unknown property of materials, a door onto whole new expanses of understanding.

One of the many things that Destroyer of Worlds  conveys is how, like Becquerel, most nuclear scientists were stumbling in the dark. How could they have done otherwise, given that the subject of their science is practically unseeable and barely even imaginable? There is the story here of how Irène Joliot-Curie, daughter of the pioneering Pierre and Marie Curie, and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, her husband, effectively discovered nuclear fission – the splitting of the atom – without realising the meaning of their findings. It was left to others to correct the Joliot-Curies’ mistake.

Which is not to say that the history of nuclear science is a history of chance and chancers. Nobel-winning geniuses emerge with almost every page-turn of Destroyer of Worlds (the Joliot-Curies would win the prize for chemistry in 1935). There is Becquerel, of course, and all those successive generations of Curies, but the man whom most, including Close, regard as the primogenitor of the nuclear revolution is New Zealand-born, Britain-domiciled Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) – not least for his distinguishing the three main types of radiation (alpha, beta and gamma) and his conception of the structure of the atom.

Others include Lise Meitner (1878-1968), whose merciless mind saw what the Joliot-Curies had missed; Niels Bohr (1885-1962), the theorist whose visions paved the way for many of the experimental discoveries that would follow; and, perhaps the greatest of them all, Ettore Majorana (1906-38), who was reluctant to publish his far-reaching, world-changing theories because he thought them facile. Although Majorana is officially said to have killed himself, there is speculation that he might have purposefully disappeared after grasping, before anyone else, the full, catastrophic proportions of the nuclear age. Close calls this speculation ‘plausible’.

Incidentally, despite the blockbusting weight his name carries nowadays, Oppenheimer gets short shrift from Close, who describes his designation as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ as ‘wrong on many fronts’. The real father figures at Los Alamos included Rudolf Peierls, Enrico Fermi and John von Neumann.

Close is fortunate with his cast of characters, and the fact that their overlapping lives often played out as a dark soap opera, since the actual science of atoms can be difficult and dry. Although Close explains it better than anyone ever has – and maybe even could – there is no escaping the fact that most of the early breakthroughs involved iteration after iteration on the same experiments. A radioactive source was placed in front of another material, and the effects were captured on some form of plate. Invisible sub-particles were sloughed off and catalogued with unblinking diligence. It is all neutrons and electrons and positrons and so-ons.

Yet Destroyer of Worlds  is admirable in its honesty. It goes where the science goes, even when the science is repetitive. And it performs its own form of iteration, too: a slow build towards awesome truths. Or is it actually a fast build? By the time Edward Teller appears on the scene, with his dreams of mass destruction, you appreciate how much had changed in so relatively short a time. Just 70 years from Becquerel’s cross to Russia’s Tsar Bomba… and then what? We are still living in the nuclear age. It is still, to some extent, ours to steer.