The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb

“During his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Frédéric Joliot made a sobering prediction. Artificial radioactivity, he warned, could someday lead to “transmutations of an explosive character,” using something called a “chain reaction.” No one had ever applied that term to a nuclear process before, and Joliot no doubt assumed that the danger lay far in the future. But within a few years, those two words were on the lips of every nuclear scientist in the world, thanks largely to a group of high-spirited physicists in Rome.”