December — Dr. Enrico Fermi achieves the first controlled nuclear ... hardship in the event of an accident at a nuclear power plant. October — The Windscale plutonium production reactor ...

That kicked off the United States’ Manhattan Project, a top-secret scientific mission to learn how to split the atom and harness its power. But one of the first ... chemists and engineers of the ...

And if that sentence fails to convince any reader that the message in these pages is terrifying and urgent, let him read on as the authors describe an accident that occurred in the autumn of 1966 at ...