i thought H.G. Wells wrote about one even earlier than this. no?
Didn’t Einstein predict this in 1905?
Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, 1933. Not a Sci-Fi writer in 1944.
“In 1944, fully a year before the first successful nuclear test …”
Chicago Pile-1 went critical in December 1942, 2 years before the story was published. From that point on it was “merely” a matter of engineering until the first bomb was made.
It’s been years since I’ve read their works on nuclear war, but I think Wells and later Heinlein were talking about the use of radioactive contamination as a weapon, rather than nuclear explosions.
http://mashable.com/2010/09/25/11-astounding-predictions/ has an H.G. Wells exceprt from 1914, as cited by Leo Szilard.
Wanted to remind authors of the podast that there is no download link for 19th issue and link to 18th issue points to 17th instead. Thus i cannot listen to 2 shows while not sitting at desktop which is very unfortunate.
The idea that vast energies could be liberated by splitting the atom was decades old by 1940. Going from that to a functioning bomb was just engineering. You wouldn’t boggle at the idea that someone wrote a story about a Moon landing in 1968.
NOTE!
The download links in the entries for episodes #18 and #19 have some kind of brokenness going on.
If you try to use them you get the file for Episode #17.
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