The dustjacket of this British edition (it was first published in the United States last year and is printed, of course, in Hong Kong) quotes that noted atomist Sir Mark Oliphant as saying: ‘It is a stupendous piece of work!’

That would seem to be going it a bit, even for a dustjacket, but one cannot but agree that it is a stupendous story. And it well told – extremely well told – which is perhaps what Sir Mark, who, as a scientist, is normally meticulous, really meant. But in case I should seem grudging let me make it clear that it really is a splendid story.

In the old sense of being a rattling good yarn … in having the excellence of ratiocination … imagination beyond concept … drama beyond dreaming … mean and magnificent human beings … such chance as you would not believe could be conceived by any but mischievous gods ... and such appalling possibility of the apocalypse as it would be much more comfortable never to have heard of.

And Bickel, who has spent a good deal of his working life flogging science to the Australian public, handles his material most persuasively. He has the knack of making you comfortable with the unaccountable. Makes you feel that he is actually on first symbol terms with E = mc² and old Albie Einstein. He gives you the comforting illusion that you really understand the essentials of the whole thing.

All knowledge is so linked … interdependent and intertwined … that it is difficult to say that this – or this – or that – was the key discovery or development that so changed the world. And yet it would not be too wild an imagining to say that what Martin Klaproth uncovered back in 1789 in Berlin was as important – or more influential – in the way of the world than was the work of the ancient mechanic who first fashioned the wheel.

And who was Martin Klaproth? You well might ask that question because his name is almost as little known as is the name of the chap … or Ms … who first worked out that round rolls easier.

But, of course, while Klaproth may have wheedled the uranium atom out of its stubborn obscurity a thousand or more others have contributed to the rationalisation of it into the most dire force the world has yet known. It is all of a piece and you cannot disassociate what Klaproth did from what Dmitri Ivanovitch Mendeleev contributed … or Roentgen … or Rutherford … or the Curies. And where should we put Bohr, Bush, Crockcroft, Fermi, Lise Meitner, Bainbridge, Oppenheimer, Seaborg, Soddy, Tizard … and the man who pressed the button when the Fat Boy dropped on Hiroshima?

The day in August 1915 that Martin Sharp kicked an outcrop of rocks in Katanga and uncovered the Shinkolobwe mine – the richest concentration of uranium ore the world has ever seen – hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (many of them yet unborn) were condemned to death.

Without the ore from Shinkolobwe the atom bomb could not have been made during World War II. But the fact is that this fabulous deposit came very near to being overlooked.

And it was very much a matter of luck that the British, American, and Russian allies had the bomb on their side. Save for chance … a matter of misdirection … Hitler might well have begun the war with this most terrible of weapons in his armament. What need of blitzkrieg then? And what sort of world would we now be living in?

Within the framework of The Deadly Element there is material for a hundred or more individual stories – some of which indeed have already been made into novels or films. In his lucidly terse style Bickel covers an enormous range and presents the end result of painstaking research with an admirable synthesis of the scholar and the storyteller.

In retrospect it might seem, for instance, that the greatest argument about the morality of atomic explosion was not the actual use of it as a weapon of war. War itself is the obscenity and the idea that certain weapons are ‘decent’ – for that it seems you might read ‘sporting’ – and others are despicable is patently ridiculous.

But there was at the time – and in the perspective of history still must be – the question as to whether it was necessary to actually destroy the populations of two Japanese cities to prove the point. Could not a neutral demonstration of that awesome might have achieved the same end?

The men who created the atom bomb were asking that question well before the dreadful day and made urgent representations to presidents of the United States in whose hands the ultimate power rested. One letter – which may have had some effect had it been read – was found unopened among Roosevelt’s papers after his death. Another addressed to Truman – who gave approval for the dropping of the bombs – was somehow or other delayed and not actually opened until ten days after Hiroshima.

I think the reaction of all of us who were alive then to hear the news of that holocaust was one of disbelief. One bomb destroying an entire city in a split second of firestorm … we did not want to believe it.

And disbelief was part of the reaction of the men who created the first explosion on Sunday (they would pick the Lord’s Day) July 16 1945 in the desert of New Mexico.

All observers were stunned, some astounded by the ferocity of the explosion … no one who saw it could forget it – a foul and awesome sight … unlike anything seen on earth before – it was climacteric for man.

Robert Oppenheimer was to say (on reflection) that when he saw that first explosion, lines from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita came to his mind: ‘I am become Death, Shatterer of Worlds.’

But Kenneth Bainbridge possibly said it better at the time … when he clambered to his feet after the incredible light had faded and the enormous shock wave had passed and said: ‘Now we are all sons-of-bitches.’ New Mexico, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were but Tom Thumb firecrackers compared to the appalling power for destruction we have created since. Yet – as Bickel reminds us – it is in essence merely power. It does not have to be destruction. It is up to us whether we are sons-of-bitches or not. The Deadly Element should be required reading – it might help us not to be.