"...the liberation of atomic energy on a large scale for industrial purposes, the development of atomic bombs, and a world war which was apparently fought by an alliance of England, France, and perhaps including America, against Germany and Austria, the powers located in the central part of Europe. He [Wells] places this war in the year 1956, and in this war the major cities of the world are all destroyed by atomic bombs." - Leo Szilard's recollection of the 1914 book decades after the end of World War II.
H.G. Wells was pretty prescient in many of his predictions but given that this was written even before World War I and well before atomic power and bombs were a gleam in the top physicists of the day (Szilard didn't conceive of nuclear chain reactions until 1933) - the predictions in The World Set Free may even top Well's prediction that a mission to the moon would be launched from the Southern Florida coast.
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