Doomsday Men weighs in at over 500 pages, a sur­pris­ing amount for a fairly narrow topic: the plans – never real­ised – to build a nu­clear weapon cap­able of dest­roy­ing life on Earth. The length of the book is exp­lained when you find the Cobalt Bomb gets about 10 pages, and the rest is taken up with the pre­hist­ory and dream life of super­weap­ons.

The first sect­ion of the book deals with the story of nu­clear phys­ics, from Ruther­ford on­wards, and the sci­ence fict­ion spec­u­lat­ions of the early 20th cent­ury. Among the inter­est­ing snipp­ets is the fact that the term “atom bomb” was coined by HG Wells in his 1914 story ‘The World Set Free’.