The discovery of the atomic nucleus was a momentous event in the history of science. It also turned out to be more momentous in the history of the world. Nuclear fission and the possibility of using its secret for war purposes were a very definite eventuality. Hitler’s Germany had already initiated a programme to tap this power for producing a weapon that could prove to be the most decisive. France as early as 1940 had succumbed and the future of the human race and human civilisation were at stake. Winston Churchill in his House of Commons speech on 18 June 1940 said: “What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ ” Could that be the voice of man speaking in the darkness of the civilisational night?

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That was the time the Luftwaffe bombs rained down, five minutes before the battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire at a Polish garrison in Danzig (modern-day Gdansk), triggering six years of warfare around the world.

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