Here's a back-tingles moment: the SLAM, with its open reactor - sans its H-bombs - is in principle almost exactly H.G. Wells' "Atomic Bombs"[1] from his The Wo

Here's a back-tingles moment: the SLAM, with its open reactor - sans its H-bombs - is in principle almost exactly H.G. Wells' "Atomic Bombs"[1] from his The World Set Free. Radiation-jetting objects that bounce all over the place, blasting everything. That novel has a good claim to inventing the nuclear bomb, at least the concept of it. Leó Szilárd, after reading the novel in 1932[2], talked about the possibility of a chain reaction[3] bomb with the BWO, which would later, after a long and predictably political road, lead to the Einstein-Roosevelt letter. Wells is one of those writers whose nickel-paperback reputation hides what a peerless visionary he was, even as a largely self-educated layman. [1] His phrasing! "Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century, than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible ... but they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands" Holy balls, that is still every single bit as relevant today. [2] 21 years post publish!! [3] Rather than the "radiant elements" used in Well's atomic bombs. Wells in 1901 had been reading the work of William Ramsay, Ernest Rutherford, and Frederick Soddy. Wells realized that although the decay (of the time) was slow, the total amount was insanely gigantic, converting the entire mass into energy. So he posited a future material that decomposed all at once. If you had a fist-sized hunk of Francium, that you got somehow, you'd get similar effects . . assuming you had a time-freezey casing to keep it from just spontaneously nuking your everything.