Greatest discovery since the discovery of fire, millions of times more powerful than fire that's atomic energy. Soon it may be supplying the world with all the energy needed for light and heat and for turning all its machinery. Unfortunately, though, the earliest principal uses of atomic energy probably will be in the services of war. This book grimly warns that air-raid shelters, corps of volunteer fire fighters and stretcher bearers, and other measures of TNT-bomb defense borrowed from London will be woefully inadequate to cope with the savagery of the atomic bomb a missile more powerful than all the thousands of tons of TNT bombs dropped upon London during World War II. If our civilian atomic defense is not ready by the time the next great war starts, all our cities exceeding 15,000 population, of which there are exactly 837, are likely to be rewarding targets for bombing. In these cities 25 million people can be killed and the cities themselves blasted into mounds of ruin.