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Actung, actung, welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray and James Holland.

And Jim, this torrent of anniversaries of the events at the end of the war is upon us. We have a special guest to help us with one of those events, haven't we? Yeah, we've got a very special guest. A great friend of the show, it's Ian McGregor, who last time we had on talking about Stalingrad, he's stuck with the Second World War just, but moved in a slightly different direction.

And I'm really grateful to him because I don't really understand science.

I don't really understand about atomic bombs.

But he now does.

I mean, we know the basics, don't we?

But we don't know anything more than that.

So he's going to explain to us about the Manhattan Project in a little two-part series we're doing on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ian, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for helping us out and saving us from having to do science prep. I knew you were going to say that. I'm sorry, I'm that predictable. That's what was really good about Chalk Valley sitting next to Frank, Professor Frank Close. Well, now you're on your own, I'm afraid. I know, I know. It'll be fine. It'll be fine. So, I mean, Ian, what I think is interesting about the build-up to the atomic bomb, I think that everyone knows this, is that there's sort of a race on,

isn't there? A bit of a one-horse race, isn't it? To be honest. There's this body of knowledge

that's out there, isn't there, the potential for an atomic weapon, sort of idea that's

being kicked around by the clever people that understand this stuff. But the Germans, in a sense,

get going on it first. Otto Hahn and Strasmann discover nuclear fission in 1938, really...

I mean, the German effort is just an absolute shower.

Let's just put that absolutely.

Yeah.

Cars on the table here.

...