Uranium is a word which has become so highly emotive in this country that it is embedded in the national psyche; but not one person in 10,000 who would react instinctively and dialectically to the word knows anything about the element itself apart from connotations of Doomsday … the world on fire or the seeping shroud of radiation sickness laying waste the entire earth in sterile despair.

In The Deadly Element, that elegant writer Lennard Bickel does the menacing and much misunderstood complex of compacted cores that form the uranium atom a considerable service with a popularist history of its discovery and utilisation to the sometimes dubious ends of mankind.