The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Just then, in 1932, Szilard found or took up for the first time that appealing orphan among H. G. Wells’ books that he had failed to discover before: The World Set Free.63 Despite its title, it was not a tract like The Open Conspiracy. It was a prophetic novel, published in 1914, before the beginning of the Great War. Thirty years later Szilard could still summarize The World Set Free in accurate detail. Wells describes, he says: . . . the liberation of atomic energy on a large scale for industrial purposes, the development of atomic bombs, and a world war which was apparently fought by an alliance of England, France, and perhaps including America, against Germany and Austria, the powers located in the central part of Europe. He places this war in the year 1956, and in this war the major cities of the world are all destroyed by atomic bombs.