Set in the 1950s, Wells’s neglected novel ‘The World Set Free’ describes a conflict so horrific that it actually is the war that ends war. Wells – the first to imagine a ‘uranium-based bomb’ – offers a prescient description of atomic warfare that renders cities unlivable for years. Drawing on discoveries by physicists and chemists of the time, Wells foresees both a world powered by clean, plentiful atomic energy – and the destructive force of the neutron chain reaction.