Nitpick: When you say “already they were most excited, not about fusion, but fission”, I think that must be the wrong way around. The short quotation that follows describes (or at least gestures at) two ways of extracting energy from nuclear reactions. The first (hydrogen to helium) is definitely fusion. The second (combining hydrogen’s electrons with its nuclei) … doesn’t sound like it would actually work, but at any rate there’s no possible way that it could be called fission.
The second definitely doesn’t work because it’s actually an endothermic reaction (reverse neutron decay), but Churchill couldn’t have known that in 1931 before neutron mass was measured accurately.
From the phrasing its possible Churchill was thinking of matter anti-matter annihilation (which I think was fairly new theory at the time) but he was mistakenly identifying the proton as the anti-particle of the electron (instead of the positron).
Nitpick: When you say “already they were most excited, not about fusion, but fission”, I think that must be the wrong way around. The short quotation that follows describes (or at least gestures at) two ways of extracting energy from nuclear reactions. The first (hydrogen to helium) is definitely fusion. The second (combining hydrogen’s electrons with its nuclei) … doesn’t sound like it would actually work, but at any rate there’s no possible way that it could be called fission.
The second definitely doesn’t work because it’s actually an endothermic reaction (reverse neutron decay), but Churchill couldn’t have known that in 1931 before neutron mass was measured accurately.
From the phrasing its possible Churchill was thinking of matter anti-matter annihilation (which I think was fairly new theory at the time) but he was mistakenly identifying the proton as the anti-particle of the electron (instead of the positron).
Whoops! Correct, I meant the other way around, will fix