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“... The most striking thing about this book is how well it is written. Each word is right for its place, the images are apt, and the quotations expressive. In explaining that his style is not that of the social scientists, the author says: ‘The methodology of this book is literary rather than analytical. This is the result of my upbringing and background ...”

“... Nuclear weapons, and the knowledge of the horrors they are capable of producing, have been with us for 35 years. We might be tempted to let familiarity blunt the impact of these facts on our mind, were it not so frequently refreshed by news of ever more powerful weapons, ever-increasing numbers in the stockpiles, and ever more efficient means of delivering them to their targets ...”

“... holiday and was never allowed to return. The scene shifts to Britain, and two refugee scientists, Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch. Niels Bohr had shown in a paper that the fissile isotope of uranium was U-235. Frisch and Peierls investigated how much would be needed to make a bomb. They underestimated the amount by a ...”

“... bomb project was set in motion in 1940 by two refugee physicists in Birmingham, the German-born Rudolf Peierls and the Austrian-born Otto Robert Frisch, when they found that the critical mass of the fissile uranium isotope 235 needed for an explosion was no more than a few kilograms. In the summer of 1941 ...”

“... item for your autobiography.’ Landau died before reaching the age of reminiscence, but Rudolph Peierls was his friend and Nevill Mott was another near-contemporary. Now that they are both about eighty, they may feel able to risk his posthumous scorn. Mott is a sort of father-in-science to me, and Peierls an uncle. Yet it ...”

“... reminds us, was in any case mild by the standards of other countries. As the refugee physicist Sir Rudolf Peierls put it, ‘in pre-Hitler Germany being Jewish was a bearable handicap.’ It was not German or the much more palpable Viennese anti-semitism that converted Herzl to Zionism, but the Dreyfus case in France. One wishes, however, that Pulzer had ...”

“... out, Britain had lusted for its own atomic bomb since two refugee scientists, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls at the University of Birmingham, suggested that fission could make a bomb. Technologically, the British were ahead of the Americans at the war’s start, and American scientists were so impressed that they urged President Roosevelt to propose ...”

“... about calculations done in Birmingham early in 1940 by the émigré physicists Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, which established that no more than a kilogram of fissionable U-235 was required for a bomb. American scientists, like the Germans, who also believed that tons might be needed, had not gone ahead with their proposed Cambridge Project, named ...”

“... by the United States.’ But the Manhattan Project grew out of a memorandum that Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls at the University of Birmingham sent to the British Government in March 1940. They pointed out the fundamental principle of a nuclear weapon (and the reason it is still so difficult to make one): the necessity to separate the isotope ...”