It was two years ago that the Oscar-winning blockbuster 'Oppenheimer' sent the message that it was the Americans, or rather one American in particular, who was responsible for the atomic explosion that brought the Second World War to an explosive close.
The man in question was native New Yorker Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project's top-secret programme of nuclear bomb-making deep in the New Mexican desert.
By August 1945 'Little Boy' and 'Fat Man' were ready to be loaded on to B-29 bombers, flown halfway across the world and dropped on two of Japan's major cities to devastating effect.
Not so fast, writes Gareth Williams. In this myth-busting book, he reveals that, without the involvement of British physicists at an early stage, the all-American 'Manhattan Project' would never have got off the ground.
And the consequences of that would have been catastrophic, leaving the USA and most of Europe at the mercy of German scientists who were rushing to develop their own weapons of mass destruction.
