Graham Farmelo: Churchill's Bomb

Graham Farmelo first appeared on the Faber Podcast in 2009 to tell us about his book on physicist Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, which went on to earn the author the Costa Biography Award. He’s back to discuss his new book, Churchill’s Bomb, a fascinating and pacy story of how Britain became a nuclear power, seen through the lens of Winston Churchill’s career. Churchill, as we learn, always had an interest in science. He was a devoted reader of H. G. Wells, and Churchill himself pondered the nuclear question in his writing. In 1937 he contemplated the destructive potential that science’s mastery of nature held out – at a time when many scientists still doubted a nuclear bomb was achievable – and asked, ‘Are we fit for it?’ The book is also a story of how the centre of nuclear physics shifted from Britain to the USA, and the coming into being of post-war geopolitics in which nuclear capability would loom so large. (www.faber.co.uk/churchillsbomb)