It is one thing to split the atom. It is another to narrate the consequences. Frank Close’s Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age is a meticulous, often moving account of how a smudge on a photographic plate in 1896 gave rise, fifty years later, to a heat brighter than the heart of the sun. But like much of the genre, it cannot quite bring itself to speak plainly about the violence at its centre. Close wants us to admire the science, and there is much to admire, but he sidesteps the political form it assumed: the bomb as empire, as coercive doctrine, as the sacred machinery of state power. In doing so, his history becomes a story of awe without accountability.
In the Jornada del Muerto desert in July 1945, a device suspended in a tower of steel gave birth to what Close calls “a man-made artificial sun.” The Trinity test released an energy “four times hotter than the heart of the sun,” incinerated the desert floor into glass, and generated a “gigantic mushroom” of shattered atoms rising miles into the atmosphere. Close recounts it in forensic detail, almost reverent in tone. “The nuclear age had arrived,” he writes, with the restraint of a physicist trained in magnitude, not morality. The scientists, lying prone in the sand, “saw portents of the apocalypse, but in total silence.”
“Energy stored within the nuclei of plutonium atoms was released with an explosive power previously unknown on Earth.”
Close writes beautifully. The elegance of the science is never lost. We learn how the Curies extracted radium from pitchblende, how Rutherford’s “capricious variation” in thorium decay gave rise to the concept of half-life, how electrons and protons rearranged themselves to release energy “over a million times larger—atom for atom—than anything made available” by previous revolutions. The prose is lucid, the explanations precise. But clarity of science is not clarity of politics.
The book is nearly silent on Hiroshima. Oppenheimer’s infamous recitation from the Bhagavad Gita—“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”—is there, but the charred remains of Japanese civilians are not. There is no examination of uranium extraction in the Congo, no mention of the Marshallese made infertile by fallout, no recognition of the politics that made some nations bomb-makers and others testing grounds. The closest we get is a quiet nod to the “MADness of Tsar Bomba,” a phrase that leans on wordplay to avoid analysis.
The problem is not the science. It is the frame. The book begins with a test, not a detonation; with theory, not war. The effect is to decontextualise the bomb from the social and imperial systems that made it possible, even inevitable. The bomb appears as a tragic outgrowth of discovery, rather than a weapon deliberately developed to secure and extend the dominance of a handful of capitalist states. The whole nuclear order, from Project Manhattan to Trident to Israel’s undeclared arsenal, is rendered in apolitical terms: a series of breakthroughs, breakthroughs all the way down.
“Atoms were the basic bricks of the substances that powered the First Industrial Revolution. Electric and magnetic forces, the cement that builds material structures from those bricks, were heralds of the Second.”
But history has a way of making silences untenable. In June 2025, while Close’s book was being read in quiet libraries, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion. A sweeping aerial assault on Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow. At least nine nuclear scientists were killed. Iran retaliated with ballistic missiles over Tel Aviv and Haifa. Civilian casualties mounted. The IAEA confirmed that nuclear diplomacy with Tehran on the brink of collapse. Western diplomats called for restraint; American warships moved into position.
This is the nuclear age, too. Not just the mushroom cloud but the targeted assassination. Not just deterrence but pre-emption. Not just energy, but violence. When Close writes that “radioactivity is intrinsic… impossible to turn on or off,” he means it as a technical description. But it applies equally to the geopolitical logic: escalation is built in. There are no responsible nuclear powers. Only powers with the bomb and those without. Some, like Israel, act with impunity; others, like Iran, are punished for ambition. Neither behaves responsibly. No one does.
“A lump greater than the critical mass is not only a scientific threshold—it is a geopolitical one. Once crossed, no state behaves responsibly.”
Close does not say this. He gestures at the risks, but never names the structure: imperialism, militarism, technological supremacy as policy. He does not ask why it is always superpowers who possess the bomb, or why abolition is never a real option. Even the scientists who dissented. Rotblat. Sakharov. Appear as lone moral actors rather than products of material struggle. The institutions they opposed are left largely unexamined.
A materialist history would look different. It would begin with the Congolese miners who extracted uranium for the Manhattan Project. It would note that the same powers who brand Iran a threat remain silent on Israel’s undeclared warheads. It would connect the physics of fission with the politics of empire, with the asset logic of deterrence, with the financial portfolios that underwrite weapons contracts. It would see, in Close’s “explosive power previously unknown on Earth,” not only discovery, but domination.
Frank Close has written a lucid and frequently gripping book. But it is a history that stops at the edge of politics. The mushroom cloud, here, is an object of awe. Not a mechanism of state terror. It is easier, perhaps, to explain the decay constant of thorium than to ask who dies when deterrence fails. Easier to admire the physicist than to indict the project. But that ease is part of the problem. In a world where scientists are again building bombs, and states are again choosing targets, silence is not neutral.
