Power & terror: a history of the nuclear age

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. In the closing years of the 19th century, scientists began recording strange phenomena, mysterious glowing gas and smudges on photographic plates. These findings triggered a process of scientific discovery in the field of nuclear physics that would ultimately lead to unprecedented devastation at the end of the Second World War. Frank Close, professor emeritus of theoretical physics at Exeter College, Oxford, spoke to Matt Elton about how a combination of people and politics shaped the nuclear age.

Before we get into the more familiar aspects of this story, I wanted to start by exploring something you say towards the start of your book, which is that it's little appreciated that there were three industrial revolutions. Could you tell us what are these three industrial revolutions? Well, the first industrial revolution involved steam power. The second industrial revolution was what I called the electromagnetic one.

By that stage, the mid to late 19th century, the idea that matter was made of atoms was now well established. The idea was that atoms are permanent and unchanging, like the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water as they turn into steam. They were the basic bricks of everything, that is matter, but the cement that held those bricks together were the electric and magnetic forces, and it was the understanding of electricity and magnetism by Michael Faraday in the mid-19th century that began what I called the electrical revolution, of the dynamo and everything that flowed from that. The third revolution, which is the one that my book is about, is what I call the atomic or nuclear revolution, the discovery at the end of the 19th century and in the early years of the 20th century that the atoms have a deep inner structure, which we call the atomic nucleus, that there's a vast amount of energy locked in there.

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