The events of history can be made or changed by the smallest of events. What if Isaac Newton had missed the apple falling from the tree? If only Einstein’s nurse has understood German we would know what his dying words were. Would Napoleon have won the Battle of Waterloo if his hemorrhoids hadn’t prevented him from riding his horse?

Take Stephanie Cooke quotation of famous German phycisist Werner Heisenberg in her book ‘In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age’. Heisenberg ‘later contended the atomic bomb was not inevitable’…

‘In the summer of 1939 twelve people might still have been able, by coming to mutual agreement, to prevent the construction of atom bombs.’

It seems amazing that such a small number of people could have held the future of nuclear weapons (and thus nuclear energy) in their hands. When the Second World War broke out many scientists joined the American atom bomb project in the hope that it would act as a deterrent to any German bomb being built and used. Only later – after completing the American bomb - did they discover that the German programme had been a failure and abandoned. That knowledge had been kept from them and as General Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project’s leader, admitted, ‘the main purpose of the project was to subdue the Russians’.

Those 12 people knew in 1939 what destructive power the Bomb would have (warnings about atomic weapons had been made as early as the 1900s). A decision from them to abandon the science of nuclear weapons seems such a small thing now and yet the consequences have been huge.