Snake Dance: Journeys Beneath a Nuclear Sky

In this unique journey across continents and centuries, award-winning author Patrick Marnham explores the ruthless dictators, dangerous minds and prehistoric precedents behind the development of nuclear power. The terrifying, awe-inspiring first use of nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was the most controversial act of warfare in human history, dramatically ending the Second World War but ushering in an uncertain new age. Yet it was also the culmination of a story that extends beyond Japan and Washington, and well beyond the 1940s: decades of personal sacrifice, centuries of colonial exploitation and millennia of primitive legend.In Snake Dance, Patrick Marnham traces this complex story, travelling from the opulent nineteenth-century palaces of King Leopold II of Belgium, built with riches plundered from the Congo, to the dangerously derelict nuclear reactor of modern-day Kinshasa, where an upturned ice-cream tub protects the activation button. He follows the classified shipment of Congolese uranium to the deserts of New Mexico -- where Native Americans had for thousands of years practised ritualistic 'snake dances' in an attempt to harness lightning -- for the Manhattan Project's secret test detonation. Here he uncovers the lives and legacies of Robert Oppenheimer and Aby Warburg, two 'mad geniuses' who confronted the devastating power of twentieth-century science in very different ways.Spanning the globe and the history of human civilisation, Snake Dance is at once an intrepid intellectual adventure and a wake-up call for mankind: as he returns full-circle to Japan, this time the catastrophe at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant in March 2011, Marnham questions whether we have learned anything at all from our hubristic experiments with nature.