When Joseph Conrad arrived in the Congo in 1890, he walked up a road “littered with the corpses of men who had been chained together and forced to build a railway”. When he returned he wrote Heart of Darkness; a story of companies who “tear treasure out of the bowels of the land, with no more moral purpose [than] burglars”.Just over half a century later, on 16 July 1945, Robert Oppenheimer watched as the world’s first atom bomb exploded in the desert of New Mexico. It exploded with a light so biblically bright that it blinded the sighted and caused the blind to see. “Now I am become Death,” Oppenheimer later said, “the destroyer of worlds.” On 6 August 1945, Death – in the form of a uranium bomb – was dropped on Hiroshima.