The Manhattan Project

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the laws that Hammurabi (c1810 - c1750 BC), King of Babylon, had carved into a black basalt pillar in present day Iraq and which, since its rediscovery in 1901 in present day Iran, has affirmed Hammurabi's reputation as one of the first great lawma ...  Show more

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most successful of Shakespeare's plays in his own time. Written with no Part 2 in mind as 'Henry the Fourth', the play explores ideas about who can be a legitimate ruler and why, and how anyone can rightly succeed to the throne. This was ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the race to build an atom bomb in the USA during World War Two. Before the war, scientists in Germany had discovered the potential of nuclear fission and scientists in Britain soon argued that this could be used to make an atom bomb, against which ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the race to build an atom bomb in the USA during World War Two. Before the war, scientists in Germany had discovered the potential of nuclear fission and scientists in Britain soon argued that this could be used to make an atom bomb, against which ...  Show more

In December 1938, a team of German physicists achieved an astonishing scientific breakthrough: they split the nucleus of a uranium atom. In the United States, news of the discovery sparked fear in the scientific community. Atomic fission could power a devastating new weapon, a ...

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This was J. Robert Oppenheimer’s reaction to the first atomic bomb test in July 1945, marking the beginning of the nuclear age. Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist of Jewish-German descent, was in charge of the American ...  Show more