Archive for February 11th, 2007
From the people who brought you ‘Hiroshima’… 0
“Yes, in May of 1946 Dr. Louis Slotin, a Manhattan Project scientist, died of severe radiation sickness caused by plutonium. Slotin was engaged in an experiment called tickling the dragon’s tail in which two beryllium-coated plutonium hemispheres were brought together in close proximity. The combined mass of the two hemispheres equaled the critical mass required to initiate a fission chain-reaction; that is, if they touched. The idea was to come as close as possible without touching. Slotin was holding the top hemisphere with his left hand when the screw driver separating them slipped. The room was filled with a blue glow and a massive emission of neutrons.”
“Slotin immediately pulled the hemispheres apart but still received a fatal dose of radiation. He died nine agonizing days later. His left hand swelled up, developed severe blisters, and gangrene shortly after the incident. Doctors kept it packed in ice rather than amputating it. Slotin was thirty-five at the time of the tragic incident.”
From: Intuitor: Sum of all Fears - Movie Review
Seriously. If I was a nuclear scientist working on developing the first nuclear weapon to kill a shitload of people and my job was to put two balls of plutonium as close together as possible without initiating a devastating reaction then I’m pretty sure I would set up something a bit more reliable and foolproof than a screwdriver!
Dying from radiation poisoning must be one of the nastier ways to go but hopefully future people involved in the mass murder of innocents by nuclear weapons learnt something from the incident…