"...for those with the time and inclination to get their heads around nuclear physics, with its dizzying intermingling of the massive and the infinitesimal, then P. D. Smith’s Doomsday Men is as good a place to start as any. Despite its rather titillating title and the schlock-horror gaudiness of its fifties-style cover, Smith’s is a hugely interesting history of some hugely difficult subject matter, in which the alchemy of nuclear fission and fusion is merely part of a wider story stretching back to the nineteenth century... Smith is no less fascinating on the pre-history of weapons of mass destruction, from the chemical weapons of the First World War, to Japan’s experiments with biological weaponry, to the bombing of German and Japanese cities (the accounts of which are scarcely less harrowing than the accounts of the effects of the atom bomb)."

You can read the rest on the author's blog here.

“In a deeper and darker study, popular science historian PD Smith takes the Faustian theme more seriously. Using a wider range of sources than Segrè (including literature, popular magazines and film), he charts the ways in which science and science fiction interacted in a quest for Doomsday ‘superweapons’ in the 20th century. From HG Wells to Dr Strangelove and after, fiction has evoked weapons of mass destruction and their consequences, and created new horizons of possibility. Many scientists and policy-makers reacted to the possibilities, and from the First World War onwards, scientists worked with the military to produce the weapons and strategies that shaped the world in which we now live. Smith’s book offers a much broader cultural-historical perspective than Segrè’s, and an equally approachable history of atomic science.”

I've not yet read Segrè's book, but I'm looking forward to doing so...