Main stream
Sir: William Bucban's review of my novel, Queen Victoria's. Bomb (24 November), is so generous that I feel I must answer his query about Professor Huxtable's immunity to radioactivity. Two factors were involved in this. One, more important in the early stages, was the character of what he calls, on page 28, the 'unsuspected connection' between magnetism and electricity which he discovered; this enabled him both to separate isotopes with what was uncanny ease judged by contemporary methods, and to confirm his hypothesis with noth- ing more dangerous than a brief dose of X-rays— although more extended work might have caused trouble: we just do not know. The second factor was the ingenious design of his two 'black boxes' which allowed him to produce a 'clean' bomb despite the zero altitude of the explosion. Recent reports from China suggest that the physicists there may now have stumbled on a somewhat similar idea.
Previous page
