Everyone knew that vast amounts of energy were locked up inside the nucleus, but nobody knew how, or even whether, this energy could be released and harnessed. In 1930 Ioffe had written that nuclear energy might provide the solution to the energy crisis that would overtake humankind in two or three hundred years’ time, but he could not promise practical results in the short, or even the medium, term.41 “In those years there could be no thought of nuclear weapons or nuclear energy,” Anatolii Aleksandrov, who was then at Ioffe’s institute, has written, “but in the physics of the nucleus great
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