[7]Wells's knowledge of atomic physics came from reading books by William Ramsay, Ernest Rutherford, and Frederick Soddy; the last discovered the disintegration of uranium.

Wells's novel may even have influenced the development of nuclear weapons, as the physicist Leó Szilárd read the book in 1932, the same year the neutron was discovered.

[9] Wells's "atomic bombs" have no more force than ordinary high explosive[dubious – discuss] and are rather primitive devices detonated by a "bomb-thrower" biting off "a little celluloid stud.

They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands [...] All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing.

Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing [...] There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape [...] Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it [...] Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.

The only possibilities remaining were "either the relapse of mankind to agricultural barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order."

The defeat of Serbia's King Ferdinand Charles and his attempt to destroy the council and seize control of the world is narrated in some detail.

"[17] The World Set Free concludes with a chapter recounting the reflections of one of the new order's sages, Marcus Karenin, during his last days.