The poet R.S. Thomas wrote of “statesmen and scientists, their hands full of the gifts that destroy”. This paradox of the human condition is central to this book, a history of how the nuclear bomb came to be made and used. Was its purpose pacific? It brought the Second World War to a close. But at what cost? The bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki have made the “superweapon”, a hydrogen-cobalt bomb so big that it would kill all life on Earth, more than a chilling possibility.

Smith tells this story by way of the physicists and scientists involved in our eventual ability to split the atom. Some - Einstein, Teller, Oppenheimer - are household names. Smith concentrates on the real Dr Strangelove of his subtitle, the brilliant, barmy, émigré Hungarian Jew Leo Szilard, whose contribution is less well recognised. Smith's account abounds in delightful anecdotes. “I have seen a physicist for the first time,” said the physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäker after meeting Neils Bohr. “He suffers as he thinks.”

Some of the history is more than a little banal. “Trust was in short supply during the Cold War. Conducted beneath a cloak of secrecy, the arms race bred a culture of fear and suspicion.” But Smith does a fine job of diligent research and summary and then stern admonition: “... the doomsday men are still at work developing new ones. And as the memories of Ypres and Hiroshima fade, the temptation to use those weapons may grow.

Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon by P. D. Smith
Penguin, £12.99 Buy the book here

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy