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From the very beginning, unlocking the power of the atom for “peaceful” energy production was about waging war to its logical endpoint: the power to destroy life on a planetary scale.

People around the world were aghast at the apocalyptic destruction wreaked on Japan during a few hellish minutes when the United States dropped the nuclear bombs codenamed Little Boy and Fatman on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The immediate loss of life, in the tens of thousands, coupled with the invisible and long-term effects of radiation sickness and cancers, brought the world up against the sharp razor edge of the nuclear age.

Subsequently, during the Cold War, NATO’s nuclear war policy was officially named MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction, a point parodied in the outstanding black comedy Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

If nuclear weapons were to have a future, perfecting them as the ultimate weapon of mass destruction needed a justification other than annihilating humans. Moreover, the plutonium typically used in fusion-based hydrogen bombs — hundreds and even thousands of times more destructive than an atom bomb — is not an element that occurs naturally on earth. It is a byproduct of fission, splitting uranium atoms to unleash and harness energy, that takes place inside nucl... >>>