But it made no difference and Fuchs was cleared to go to America to work on the atom bomb.

BBC: How atom spy slipped security net

To some it might have seemed at odds with the new era of the atom bomb and jet-powered flight.

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Truman entered the White House not knowing that America had the atom bomb.

ECONOMIST: Endicott Peabody

Taniguchi was just 8 years old and just a mile and a quarter from ground zero when the atom bomb hit Hiroshima.

FORBES: Magazine Article

As they waited to disembark in India, Mr Davies heard on the radio that an atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima in Japan.

BBC: War veteran George Davies to make final Sri Lanka journey

Taking just one example, the development of much of modern physics (from quantum theory to the creation of the atom bomb) owes its success to teamwork.

CNN: Is collaboration the future of invention?

In fact, Libya's effort to concoct an atom bomb never got very far, and its small stock of rudimentary chemical weapons is probably already in the rubbish bin.

ECONOMIST: Libya

It emerged that in her capacity as a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association in London, she had photographed documents on the British atom bomb and passed them on to the KGB.

BBC: Spying scandal spreads

The documents started the hunt for spies such as Kim Philby, a British foreign-policy adviser, and Klaus Fuchs, a scientist passing on technical details about the atom bomb to the Soviet Union.

ECONOMIST: Svetlana Gouzenko

He signed the letter to Franklin Roosevelt warning that it may be possible to build an atom bomb, and the letters of his famed equation relating energy to mass hover in our minds when we picture the resulting mushroom cloud.

NPR: Einstein: Relatively Speaking, a Complicated Life