Perseus Academic: Churchill's Bomb by Graham Farmelo

Perhaps no scientific breakthrough has shaped the course of human history as much as the harnessing of the atom. Yet the twentieth century might have turned out entirely differently had this powerful technology stayed under the control of Great Britain, whose scientists spearheaded the Allies' nuclear arms program at the outset of World War II. As award-winning science historian Graham Farmelo reveals in Churchill's Bomb, Britain's supposedly visionary leader remained unconvinced of the potentially earth-shattering implications of his physicists' research. Churchill ultimately shared Britain's nuclear secrets with — and ceded its initiative to — America, whose successful development and deployment of an atomic bomb placed the United States in a position of supreme power at the dawn of the Nuclear Age.

A groundbreaking investigation of the twentieth century's most important scientific discovery, Churchill's Bomb reveals the secret history of the weapon that transformed modern geopolitics.

Graham Farmelo is Senior Research Fellow at the Science Museum, London and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Northeastern University. Winner of the Costa Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Strangest Man, he lives in Richmond, England.