David Johnson wrote:

> To be fair, Beam -- whose "Google" was just the public library --
> wrote "Police Operation" in late 1947, only two years after the
> American nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Imagining that
> when "a certain number of neutrons . . . broke apart," the product
> would be "in effect atoms of hydrogen" and "a flash and a bang" seems
> like a pretty good guess. ;-)

Wouldn't splitting a neutron in an atomic nucleus be roughly equivalent
to adding a proton, resulting in an element with the next higher atomic
number?