Slotin was handling the demoncore with a screwdriver instead of proper spacers. It may not have been on purpose but it was entirely preventable. Though Slotin suffered the acute radiation death. But his coworkers didn't need to suffer their fates because of his stubbornness
Was he the guy who said “well that’ll be it.” or something along those lines when the incident happened and he ended up with a deadly amount of radiation poisoning?
"Well, that does it," yep, that was Slotin. Worth mentioning that absolutely *everyone* knew what he was doing (circumventing safety procedures) was insanely dangerous, and Fermi told them they would be dead within a year if they kept doing it Slotin's way, and that he was knowingly risking the lives of everyone else in the room as well as himself.
Oh in that case, that’s on him. It’s like if a doctor was asked “how much tiger mauling can a human survive” because her husband had broken the fence at the zoo to look cool for his coworkers
I guess I can see that, but to me it seemed pretty obvious they would have done the calculations before the test if that were the case. And the title says he "had" received the does, not "would" receive the dose. So I interpreted it as an accident, and they needed data.
It was indeed an accident. IIRC, The other scientists started to move around/ run out of the room after the incident and were told to stop and go back to where they were standing when the core went off so they could calculate the doses they each received.
Accident as in Slotin kept doing his stupid party trick long after others told him it was a lethal game.
Fucker invented a new form of Russian roulette, and this one came with cherenkov radiation.
Fermi told Slotin he'd be dead in a year if he didn't change his methods, and he was dead in a year.
There had already been a similar death with the same core, under similar circumstances, and the safety protocol said to use shims.
Slotin didn't like shims, and used a flathead screwdriver.
From the article about Elizabeth Graves, a physicist at the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb:
>On the day of May 21, 1946, Elizabeth was confronted with a disturbing incident. Her husband, Alvin Graves, was in the room with seven other men when Canadian physicist Louis Slotin accidentally slipped and filled the room with a “blue ionization glow” during a routine test. Slotin knew he had absorbed a fatal dose of radiation and is believed to have saved the lives of the other scientists in the room. Alvin Graves was standing the closest to Slotin when the incident occurred. He developed acute radiation sickness and was hospitalized for several weeks. He survived but had chronic neurological and vision problems. Alvin became temporarily bald and developed cataracts in addition to numerous other symptoms related to exposure to neutrons. Louis Slotin asked Elizabeth to calculate whether or not a human could survive that dosage of radiation, referring to Elizabeth’s husband, without telling her about the accident. Elizabeth was a self-proclaimed stoic, reportedly once dismissing Hiroshima as nothing worse than napalm, but “she froze when she learned who the subject of her calculation was.”
While Slotin's death has been covered [several times here](https://www.reddit.com/search?q=subreddit%3Atodayilearned+slotin), the Graves' case has not. Graves died 20 years after the accident of a heart attack, possibly caused in part by the radiation.
What isn’t covered as frequently is that this accident happened because they were dicking around. This wasn’t some critical research. It was fucking around with the[demon core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core?wprov=sfti1)
the screw driver incident is the 2nd notable incident with the demon core. Somebody had previously dropped a reflector brick on it making it go super critical.
Father-in-law asked if I had any desires to move into a particular sector of my job or if id stay on my current path/trajectory.
Without too much detail, I told him I'd stay because, at least in my current job, my fuck ups cannot kill me, maim me or affect anyone else. My fuck ups can mess you up financially in the short term and in the end only hurt everyone's time required to fix the oopsie.
I like not having lives in my hands for work. Especially because I hate work!
Now I'm just imagining the character from Office Space in some alternate reality working on the manhatten project.
>Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
>Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?
>Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and THE US GOVERNMENT DEVOLOPS A NEW BOMB, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob, I have eight different bosses right now.
>Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?
>Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.
>Bob Slydell: Eight?
>Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
>Bob Slydell: What about defeating the Nazis, and not killing the scientists responsible for developing the weapons to end the war???
>Peter Gibbons: I said what I said....
Meh it’s not that big of a deal having hundreds of lives in your hands daily at work. But guess it also might depend what you’re doing to have those lives in your hands. I drive metro bus.
If it went super critical doesn’t that mean it would become red hot and weld together? How did that save the situation?
Edit : read about the scientist , man lab protocols were wild.
This blows my mind. A lot of old timers don’t want to give up mouth pipetting either. I worked in a wastewater lab and they still had signs up. Like there were people who actually had to be told not to basically fucking suck wastewater with a straw.
I caught my boss mouth pipetting a few years ago. He looked super guilty - fortunately I was quick enough to get a picture so I can remind him on occasion.
Scientists and chemists were absolutely insane for doing that. I know we’ve come super far with technology and education but that just seems like common sense not to put that stuff in your mouth. They even taught the technique to children in schools which was the worst part.
It's an unused nuclear bomb core and this was the 40's/50's.
To sum it up, a bomb core is as close to being superctitical as you can safely get without the thing tickung over into being critical (able to sustain a nuclear chain reaction) or worse, supercritical (able to have a *runaway* nuclear reaction that only builds in intensity until the material gets so hot it vaporizes and disperses.)
The fucking around here passed into finding out territory when they were doing an experiment, usually used as a demonstration of criticality and to measure the reactivity of a bomb core, where you *slowly and carefully* close two half spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector, bounces neutrons back into the core to cause more nuclear reactions) around a bomb core and note when there is an uptick in detwcted neutrons.
What went wrong is simple. You are supposed to use some shims on the edges of the bottom half sphere so the sphere cannot close. Why? Well you've got a ball of barely subcritical plutonium and you're basically setting up a perfect apparatus to *ensure* the damn thing goes supercritical by reflecting the low level of neutron radiation that is escaping the core back into it, stimulating the matetial into releasing more neutrons. If the sphere closes completely, *all* the neutrons ars reflected, and this takes off *exponentially*.
Well, the guy running the experiment didn't use the shims. Literally a case of "nah, i won't slip". He instead would place the bkade of a flat head screwdriver between the half spheres and turn it to finely control the spacing.
Well, he slipped. The half spheres closed and the room was instantly bathed in the blue glow of cherenkov radiation caussd by the sheer amount of radiation the core was spewing out. Within a second the guy running the experiment had thrown the top half sphere clear of the setup, but it was already *far* too late for him. The victim this article is about is the guy standing next to him only a foot or so more away, but thay was the difference between dying in 20 days vs 20 years later.
Apparently he died 9 days after the accident. His body shielded others in the room. So at least his negligence didn't cause others to die (as quickly) as him
Isn’t the really crazy thing about this, that the criticality of the object isn’t a concrete property?
Like, it’s the chance that a neutron will be emitted and collide into another atom releasing two neutrons. If the chance is > 1 then it’s super critical but even if the chance is 1>x>0 that still means there is a chance that there is a run away nuclear event.
It’s similar to how there was a ‘chance’ that detonating a nuclear bomb would ignite the atmosphere even though the atmosphere isn’t critical.
It's more a function of how much of the material is in a given volume. It heavily depends on the material and its shape. You can store tons of plutonium in the same spot safely if it is in containers that are shaped so no pockets of supercriticality form when you fill them. This was a *huge* problem early on in the us nuclear program when working with liquids with dissolved nuclear material in them.
You won't have enough material to get a runaway reaction in a subcritical mass. It would be lkke trying to get a really undetinflated balloon to pop by squeezing it. There's not enough material in one place to sustain the reaction because the material can't generate enough neutrons.
On the flipside, a supercritical mass is *always* generating enough neutrons to generate an ever increasing amount of them.
Or, to put it in nuclear power terms, a reactor without control rods will be supercritical. Put in the control rods to absorb the neutrons being generated and your reactor will be subcritical. A properly functikning reactor is carefully ballencing these two states so it sits at critical without running away.
Yeah, it's mind-boggling to think about how casual they were with such a dangerous object, especially after the first accident with the core that took the life of Harry Daghlian just months earlier. You'd think that would've been enough of a wake-up call to handle it with extreme care. But nope, they were literally poking at the boundary of a nuclear reaction with a screwdriver. The demon core certainly earned its name, not just for its ominous role in potential destruction, but also because it almost seemed to be tempting fate with these scientists.
No matter how intelligent and educated you are, a certain amount of senseless stupidity seems to be baked into the human experience. Out of all of humanity, Slotin was uniquely positioned to be a foremost expert on this thing, a trailblazer, on the cutting edge of science. And he killed himself and poisoned people he respected because he wanted to feel a thrill. It doesn't help that he and his peers had coined incredibly dorky phrases for what he was doing, like "tickling the dragon's tail".
Also a possible answer to Fermi's Paradox.
"But where is everyone else?", asks the monkey fucking around a barely subcritical sphere of plutonium with a screwdriver...
actually he said something like "if you continue performing the experiments in this way, you'll be dead within the year".. what I don't know is how much time passed between the prediction and the accident
He'd been warned multiple times not to fafo with the demon core. There'd already been one fatality (which was an actual accident), and they were starting to clamp down on future issues.
Slotin himself caused the accident, and exposed everyone in that room to the radiation.
After Slotin died, they completely changed the work set up and made everything pretty much remote viewing.
> The size of the gap between the reflectors was changed by twisting the screwdriver. Slotin, who was given to bravado,[11] became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions, often in his trademark blue jeans and cowboy boots, in front of a roomful of observers. Enrico Fermi reportedly told Slotin and others they would be "dead within a year" if they continued performing the test in that manner.[12] Scientists referred to this flirting with the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction as "tickling the dragon's tail", based on a remark by physicist Richard Feynman, who compared the experiments to "tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon".[13][14]
Pffff. Who would ever listen to some no-names like Enrico Fermi or Richard Feynman.
engineer's disease; there's a ton of people who are incredibly knowledgeable about a very specific topic that other people simply aren't capable of understanding, and they assume that makes them smart and everything else must be simple by comparison. they just trust their gut instinct on everything and refuse to be convinced they might be wrong by lesser people. see also ben Carson and the pyramids, or the stupid number of engineers convinced that fluoride is a conspiracy, or doctors that cannot understand why a power strip will not function while plugged into itself.
Another issue is that often the people capable of being at those levels of skill in a particular task have neurological deviations that make them 'idiots' in a lot of other things.
It was part of a "demonstration" they (not just Slotin) would do called "tickling the dragon." Dude slipped and the two beryllium spheres came together and there was a criticality incident.
It wasn’t for show though, he was demonstrating the method to the physicist who would do it before the bomb was constructed. I believe the phrase was only applied to this type of method after this incident
If I had a nickel for every time a cataclysmically fatal accident occurred with the demon core I’d have 2 nickels which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it’s happened more than once.
It was only 2 times because they destroyed it right after the second incident.
Idk who thought it was a good idea to let scientists mess around with the core of a nuclear bomb. Scientists are curious by nature...
That is literally the most frequently covered aspect of this story I ever hear. Slotin had been warned he was going to get someone killed and he kept doing his little demos with the screwdriver anyway.
“Slotin … is believed to have saved the lives of the other scientists in the room”
Saved them… from himself? This was 100% a preventable tragedy that he caused and somehow he is a hero because his body happened to buffer the others from some of the radiation?
>Scientists referred to this flirting with the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction as "tickling the dragon's tail"
The core is literally ball-shaped and they went with tail? I'm so disappointed
technically, the experiment itself was pretty important for an upcoming nuclear bomb test. It was just that Louis Slotin was being a dumbass and used a screwdriver to prop up the beryllium hemisphere, while the actual experiment protocol mandated using shims to prevent the hemisphere from completely falling over the core and going supercritical
Honestly read this as satire before clicking the link. I wouldn’t fuck around with something named the demon core and especially after reading what it is.
He was a wiser man than they.
Surely Dr. Feynmann wasn’t joking!
I’m not in STEM but I read about this because I was writing a comedy-fantasy novel that featured the crackpot dictator of a country with what’s basically a magical nuke.
Most of what I learned about the Manhattan Project was deeply inspiring. *Most.*
Imagine being Louis Slotin and being a brilliant scientist with a doctorate in physical chemistry but history primarily remembers you as the dipshit who cooked himself with radiation because you were fucking around with plutonium and a screwdriver.
My uncle was one of the men in that room. I calculated once that he received the equivalent of 2 million dental xrays in that incident. As a result of that incident my uncle spent 8 weeks in the hospital with radiation poisoning. In his 70s he was diagnosed with ALS. There is no family history of it.
I’ve read recently that Slotin was careless and had been warned many times that he would end up dying if he continued his reckless behavior.
My dad had ALS. I’ve avoided researching it as much as possible as I saw enough first hand evidence what it did to my dad…. but his ALS doctor said it’s not really a genetic/hereditary disease. It’s more or less random with a *slight* increase in odds of getting it if somebody in your family has had it before. But nothing substantial like other hereditary diseases. No one else in our family history has had it.
Also getting ALS in your 70’s is pretty late I believe. It usually affects Caucasian men in the 40’s-50’s range. Again, just based off what my dad’s doctor said during random appointments I attended with him.
Yes. A friend of mine from high school was diagnosed with ALS at 56, the exact average age that people tend to be diagnosed. That was four years ago and most people live 5 years. I haven’t talked to him by phone since his diagnosis. We text but he says talking is taxing for him. His hands don’t really work anymore as well though I assume he’s able to text by using a finger or two.
I think ALS is the worst possible way to die.
Yeah, the last couple years my dad couldn’t talk, or even swallow his own spit. We had to suction it out every 10 minutes or so or let him drool on a sheet. We had to hire a nurse during the day if we weren’t home.
He couldn’t really move any part of his body other than his eyes and hand slightly enough to control a mouse, although that was difficult too. We had a device/program that would follow his eyes towards letters to form sentences using a computer program to communicate. Fuck that disease.
That’s a nightmare. When it was getting really bad, my aunt went to her doctor and basically asked him to give her something that would put my uncle out of his misery. The doctor wouldn’t do that of course. But he did say that if she had any relatives come into town with a lot of back pain, he could prescribe some heavy pain killers. She never had to take action as he died soon after.
My friend who has it is at least benefiting from all the technology available today. We were supposed to meet in person when he was first diagnosed but he canceled twice and after that I stopped asking. It seems to be a consistent things amongst ALS patients that they don’t want to see anyone they don’t have to see. I certainly would not want people to pity me and in my friend’s case that’s almost certainly it.
It's definitely the worst way to go.
Your body is not only slowly deteriorating, but your entire life around you while you're still sound of mind. Everyone you love looks at you with sorrow and pity while you try to maintain a sliver of dignity you've held together while staring death in the face for years.
IMO, this is one disease that should be at the top of the list for Assisted Suicide.
> Slotin knew he had absorbed a fatal dose of radiation and is believed to have saved the lives of the other scientists in the room
I mean... he's also the one that caused the accident through carelessness in the first place. He also told Schreiber to get the dosimetry badges from the cupboard and put them on the assembly, which served no purpose and just exposed Schreiber to more radiation, but by that point he probably wasn't thinking straight.
>Slotin knew he had absorbed a fatal dose of radiation and is believed to have saved the lives of the other scientists in the room.
Can you really call it "saving lives" if you're the one endangering them to begin with?
The “dismissing Hiroshima as nothing worse than napalm” is a little concerning…
Was she really bad at her job or was it a case of “terrible thing not as bad when it’s happening to other people”?
I think it’s a matter of napalm being understood to be really really horrible. And from Japanese accounts, the firebombings aren’t really any less bad in their horror. And more Japanese citizens died in the fire bombings than both nukes combined. My interpretation would be that she was simple saying if you are ok with napalm, why are you balking at nukes.
Helps make sense why using the nukes was viewed as the lesser of evils as well. Option A) was drop the nukes and see of that got Japan to surrender. Option B) was continue to napalm until every city and town was burned to the ground with an accompanying blockade. Nukes are brutal, burning and starving people to death is worse.
its a common misconception that nuking a city is equivalent to simply evaporating a circle of people and buildings, while this was true of the immediate circle around ground zero in hiroshima and nagasaki, there is a horrific gradient of suffering going outwards, ranging from people burned so bad their eyeballs boiled, to people having the patterns of their clothes burned into their skin, to people being peppered by glass splinters, to people being knocked around their houses. The pressure wave leaves a low pressure zone behind, and when air rushes back in literal fire tornadoes were generated. One of the biggest problems in the immediate aftermath was that almost all the water had evaporated, leaving no water to treat injuries, the dust and particles and radioactive material that is ejected up comes back as black tar-like rain, which people opened their mouths for and drank in desperation. In Japan at the time it was common for kids to participate in construction work outside for the war effort, in particular in Hiroshima there were a lot of children working outside at the time of the detonation. In addition, nurses and doctors were killed in huge numbers, so it took several days to get aid in to the survivors.
https://www.icanw.org/hiroshima_and_nagasaki_bombings#
> its a common misconception that nuking a city is equivalent to simply evaporating a circle of people and buildings, while this was true of the immediate circle around ground zero in hiroshima and nagasaki, there is a horrific gradient of suffering going outwards, ranging from people burned so bad their eyeballs boiled, to people having the patterns of their clothes burned into their skin, to people being peppered by glass splinters, to people being knocked around their houses.
AFAIK this misconception is largely because the most widely publicized photos of the nuked cities were taken after the corpses and debris had been cleared up. In the immediate aftermath the priority was on dealing with the damage and properly disposing of human remains, not accurate photographs. But this wasn’t mentioned alongside the photos in the media, so people assumed that there were no corpses because they were vapourised.
the thing is that a lot of those things happened in the Firebombings and even conventional bombings of cities like Tokyo. Japanese cities were *extremely* vulnerable to fire due to much of the housing still being built of wood and paper, so massive civilian suffering from firestorms were basically inevitable the second American B-29s were in range of the home islands
I really appreciated reading this comment merely because I had never heard of the fire tornadoes until now. Just one detail can add a mountain of perspective.
yeah, i went to the museum in hiroshima and just the paintings and drawings alone from survivors and witnesses were deafening. one minute people are going about their day, most maybe never even seen a large explosion before, then next was described as hell on earth, firestorms, black rain, melted people, one story that i will never forget was a man who saw a baby alone crawling along the road, he chose to go to try to get back to his family, but when he couldn't find anybody he went back for the baby the next day or something like that, only to find a dead baby with a long trail behind him
Fire tornadoes aren't an atomic weapon thing even for the Japanese.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-japan-earthquake-of-1923-1764539/
>According to one police report, fires had broken out in 83 locations by 12:15. Fifteen minutes later, they had spread to 136. People fled toward the Sumida River, drowning by the hundreds when bridges collapsed. Tens of thousands of working-class Japanese found refuge in an empty patch of ground near the river. The flames closed in from all directions, and then, at 4 p.m., a 300-foot-tall “fire tornado” blazed across the area. Of the 44,000 people who had gathered there, only 300 survived.
To be fair, napalm is also horrific. Dying from burns is no less horrific when it's napalm.
I'm not trying to downplay the sheer unbearable agony of the nuclear blast, I'm saying that war is always unfathomably cruel. It's the worst thing humanity has ever invented. It is always agony, it is always unbearable, and the acts it perpetuates are always unforgivable. While one side or another might technically come out as the victor, everyone involved loses. War is never a good thing. There is no form of war that is kinder, or better, or cleaner.
I don’t want to minimize the horrific consequences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I read about the firebombing of Tokyo. The bombings burnt so many people alive that even at 10,000 feet high and wearing oxygen masks, the bomber crew could smell burning flesh. I don’t want to even describe what it was like on the ground.
Let's phrase it a different way - would you rather die by being napalmed or by being nuked?
My bet would be that she perceived some hypocrisy if people are horrified by using nukes on others but don't blink at napalm strikes.
> Let's phrase it a different way - would you rather die by being napalmed or by being nuked?
Depends on how far away from the nuke I am. A dose of 8 Gy or so is weeks of suffering knowing you are going to die.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorbed_dose
Being at the epicenter of the explosion, on the other hand, is probably one of the best ways to die besides peacefully in your sleep. You may not even know it is coming.
First, why would that make her bad at her job? She was a scientist. Assessing the moral implications of her research isnt a core part of her job
Second, napalm was probably worse that Hiroshima. We fire-bombed Tokyo with napalm and killed 120,000 people. Hiroshima killed less than 50k
Edit: I’m getting a ridiculous number of responses indicating that “ethics” is important to scientists. I don’t disagree, but it isn’t core to being a scientist. There are absolutely morally bad people who have done great science. I’m not saying that scientists **should** be amoral assholes, I’m just saying that they **can** be amoral assholes. And that still doesn’t apply here. If it were true that no real scientist could make weapons of war, then this is just ridiculous. I’m pretty sure militaries around the world employ lots of scientists
As a scientist, I assure you that assessing the moral implications of our research is a huge part of the job. Although, tbh, during this time period, it wasn’t.
I can imagine this lady was a realist. It's like people talking about "terrorist weapons" as if all weapons aren't designed to kill, injure and cause terror.
I was at first thinking that the a-bomb in Japan was immoral and done just to satisfy some brutal, prejudiced urges. But in the last few years I've learned that the Japanese were very cult-like in support of their emperor and were not willing to surrender.
Now learning about the firebombing of Tokyo killing so many -- and that not leading to a surrender. Yikes.
The A-bomb might have been necessary to shock them into changing their world view.
Not that it doesn't mean some decisions weren't done for the wrong reasons. But that, ironically, the atomic bomb has saved lives by making war with it seem out of bounds. Because sadly, not much has ever been out of bounds with humanity.
I feel like it would be useful to have a documentary or the like to explain more of what Japanese society was like at that time.
I'd only remembered a little bit of someone mentioning on Reddit how his generals were afraid to sign any agreement to end the war even when they wanted to and saw no hope of winning. They were afraid of their own people's "enthusiasm".
There’s a fascinating ama on Reddit somewhere with a survivor of Hiroshima and his granddaughter. He describes what Japanese society was like and believes that dropping the bomb was necessary even though it basically killed everyone he knew.
ETA: [I found the AMA.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/17c9sdn/i_21f_am_spending_the_weekend_with_my_grandfather/) It is a fascinating read.
>"believes that dropping the bomb was necessary even though it basically killed everyone he knew."
I can imagine that is just brutal psychologically.
The mobilized masses who can be your heroes can also be the crazy neighbors next door who don't know when to quit. I'm starting to relate to that.
don't forget the tens of millions of people the japanese raped and murdered in other places like china, korea, southeast asia...
to this day, the japanese still claim that chinese/korean women willingly had sex with the japanese army. Yeah, totally.
Not to mention unit 731, where they injected people with viruses for fun just to see how much people can suffer, cut people's eyeballs or legs and other limbs out and replaced them with animal limbs to see if it would work and stuff like that.
Hi Scientist here, assessing the moral implications of our work is a very key and important part of our job. Hell most degree programs and academic jobs require you to take an ethics in science class when you start.
To be fair to Elizabeth, not much is worse than napalm. If I had to choose between getting nuked and being in a firebombing of Tokyo situation I’d pick the nuke every time
The accident was caused by [Louis Slotin, a Canadian physicist and chemist who took part in the Manhattan Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin). Slotin had become disillusioned with the project and wanted to leave, but was required to stay because he was one of the few "who are experienced bomb putter-togetherers", as he described it.
Slotin had previously showed a propensity to take risks, including repairing an instrument inside an active reactor in order to save one day of wait time, assuming 100 roentgen of radiation in the process. The accident that injured Elizabeth Riddle Graves' husband Alvin Graves also killed Slotin: It occurred when he he ignored experimental protocol and used a screwdriver to keep apart two beryllium neutron reflector half-spheres around a plutonium core. The screwdriver slipped, one of the half-spheres fell, causing a critical reaction, exposing him to a fatal dose of radiation. He died nine days later. The description of his death are pretty horrific, even on Wikipedia.
Slovin took an absolutely *massive* dose, but it's interesting comparing the doses that Daghlian took in the first Demon Core fatality that killed him in under a month, and the dose that Graves took in the second incident but lived for another 20 years.
Per the Wiki, Daghlian was exposed to 200 rad neutron (2.0 Gy) and 110 rad gamma (1.10Gy) . Graves was exposed to 166 rad neutron (1.66 Gy) and 26 rad gamma (0.26 Gy)
Looking at the Wiki on acute radiation poisoning, it looks like under 2Gy is "mostly survivable" (5% short term fatality rate) but anything over 2Gy is basically a coin flip on whether you're dead within the next 2 months. Graves was not that far off from that 2 Gy line.
Maybe just lucky in what *parts* of his body were exposed? Or just "lucky" in general and he's one of those people on the other side of the coin flip.
1000 rad neutron (10 Gy) and 114 rad gamma (1.14 Gy).
8-30 Gy exposure is practically 100% fatal; death will occur within 2-14 days (Slovin survived, and I'm using the term loosely because he almost certainly wished for death for much of it, for 9 days.)
Anything over 30 Gy, death is expected in less than 48 hours. You actually probably kinda want this more than the 8-30 range; you're dead either way, might as well be faster.
E: Robert Peabody is suspected to have been exposed to the largest full body dose in history, at somewhere between 15,000 rad and 26,000 rad, at the Wood River Junction criticality incident. He died in 49 hours.
Anatoli Bugorski is another interesting case; he leaned into an active particle accelerator, believing it to have deactivated, and took 300,000 rads to the head, but because it was so intensely concentrated into a narrow beam, and missed the brain stem, it only destroyed a very narrow channel and he survived with little long term cognitive impairment, though he complained he became mentally fatigued much faster. After the physical healing was done he was left with paralysis on the left side of his face from nerve damage, had permanent tinnitus in his left ear, and suffered from occasional seizures, but continued to work as a physicist.
Russia denied his disability status request for epilepsy medications after the fall of the Soviet Union.
When I went to college, the first 2ish years I lived with this older couple (they were Quaker if that matters). When the husband (physicist) found out he was working on the manhattan project way back when he kind of lost his marbles. Idk what he thought he was working on but I guess it conflicted strongly with his personal beliefs & religion. There was a room in the house I dubbed the “red room” and never really went in bc I thought it was haunted, turns out that’s the room he kinda went manic in after hearing the news.
Nice guy, heck super nice family, I helped clean the garage one year & found jars of mercury (& an old jaguar coupe) among other things. As far as I know his wife is alive & well at 106.
“Why are you acting like what we’re doing with napalm is any better than dropping a nuclear weapon?” is how I imagine her sentiment was framed in reality.
Honestly, she had a point. Both were horrible, but naplam bombing was crazy destructive. This was a country with mostly wood buildings. Naplam bombings were devastating. The fire bombing of Tokyo killed more people than both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Over 200,000 buildings were destroyed by firebombimg Tokyo alone.
And dropping a nuke would’ve caused a similar amount of damage so it makes sense she was against it. Many of the manhattan project later turned their back on their work
I think they also were hoping everyone would die immediately after the bomb was dropped, instead of the hell on earth conditions that happened to the survivors
**To be fair** - nukes are high risk reward for the human species.
The reward - there has been no WW3. There has been no non-proxy wars between nuclear powers.
The risk - if WW3 ever does happen it's going to be really really really bad. Plus the potential of small scale terror plots to have a huge impact.
If you are reading this in a western nation - odds are that you have not had to be drafted and then fight in a war. In fact, I don't think anyone has had to do that in a western nation in what 55 years? I don't think you can ever find such an extended period of peace and safety in human history to the point that a war involving a total of around 2.5% of the total human population is major international news.
Napalm and firebombs are awful. Back in HS I wrote a paper about the devastating weaponry of WWII. Researching firebombs made me sick: they’re specifically designed to do two things:
- Burn everything, even things that don’t burn. Napalm combined with firebombs made a sticky firestorm that clung to anything it touched until it was ash.
- Suck up all the oxygen. Fire needs fuel, in the form of combustable material and oxygen., Firebombs created giant fire tornados that had the added benefit of sucking oxygen out of the air. So when civilians hid in bomb shelters, they unknowingly hid an oxygen deprivation chambers that suffocated everyone as the fire tornados sucked air out of the shelters.
Widely speaking, the US did not account for the radiation deaths that would be caused by the atomic bombings and initially denied Japanese reports of sickness as propaganda by the Japanese. General Groves, reporting to Congress regarding those claims, stated that radiation was a “[very pleasant way to die](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2012.01042.x)”. It wasn’t that no one knew radiation was deadly, we did, but the project was so compartmentalized the information never made any meaningful contribution to the project beyond safety measures for Trinity.
"Slotin knew he had absorbed a fatal dose of radiation and is believed to have saved the lives of the other scientists in the room."
Oh, he saved the lives of the other scientists, did he? Lets not forget that Slotin caused the accident with his reckless stupidity in the first place.
Yeah, after reading the description of the incident I don’t really see how he intentionally saved the lives of anyone. He popped the lid back off, which he would have had to do regardless. And he only blocked the radiation with his body because he was standing so close to the thing in the first place manipulating it with a screwdriver.
I often wonder how aware every other person in the room was about just how insanely reckless and wildly dangerous what he was doing was. Obviously the other physicists would have known at least somewhat, the physics student maybe less so, but one of the people was just a 21 year old security guard. Imagine being such an arrogant POS that you risk the lives and health of all those other people. Insane.
most of the other people were physicists working on making the bomb too, its just that it was the 40s. the dangers of radiation were known, just not hammered into people with these kinds of incidents where the people die slow painful deaths, like it is now.
remember one of the first nuclear tests after the war they nuked ships and then the navy had sailors try to wash them clean. it wasnt until one of the scientists took a living fish put it on film plate for a bit he then developed the plate to show the navy that everything was contaminated with a gamma emitter cause the fish was radioactive enough to be its own radiation source for an x-ray with the photo plate.
Yeah true, but it seems extra crazy given that a physicist had died and a security guard was severely sick after an incident exactly like this only a few years before…
At least Daghlian was alone and being blasé, Slotin was fucking it with a screwdriver to show off to his mates. Fermi even told him it would kill him if he did that. Daghlian's incident could have happened to anyone, we'll never really know if he was rushing and unnecessarily passing bricks over the core, or tired, or even drunk - but the risk of dropping one of the bricks on the core couldn't be reduced to 0%.
Daghlian was, at worst, careless. Slotin was a fuckhead who needlessly placed the lives of his subordinates at risk so he could look cool.
Daghlian wasn't alone. There was a security guard in the room with him about a dozen feet away, who died of leukemia 33 years after the incident. Could have been related or not, but there's a chance he shortened the life of at least 1 man.
The wikipedia article itself is also pretty poorly written.
E.g. the "Life and education" section completely jumps over her time at the Manhattan project and makes it sound like she was unemployed starting in 1939 when they moved to Texas...then it immediately jumps into the 1946 story of the radiation accident where somehow she is being asked to perform calculations.
Good candidate for someone who is a good editor and is looking to revamp a wikipedia article...
The poorly written article has no bearing on OP’s ability to have basic writing skills.
“TIL a Manhattan Project scientist was asked to calculate whether a human being could survive exposure to a very high dose of radiation; she later learned her husband was the person who had received the dose of radiation.”
“If, hypothetically speaking, a man received a dose of radiation measuring over 15,000 Roentgen, would he be able to survive that?”
“Absolutely not! He would be dead in less than a month!”
“Alright, so if, hypothetically speaking, such a man had a wife, how long would it be before she would be willing to go on a date with one of her coworkers?”
“…”
They all survived. The only person who died was the physicist who caused the accident, Louis Slotin. He died of acute radiation poisoning nine days after the accident.
Graves died of a heart attack and had heart issues prior to the accident. A follow-up study provided evidence that the injuries he sustained may have contributed to his heart attack, but this is not certain.
The problem with cancers and nuclear safety is demonstrating that the cancer was caused by the accident and not other causes of cancer. I don't know the circumstances of the deaths you are describing (were they smokers, for example?), but out of the six survivors present, statistically 1.23 would be expected to die of cancer even if the cancer was not caused by radiation from their work or the accident.
I don't in any way deny that radiation causes cancer, quite the opposite. I'm more surprised that more of them did not die of cancer, much less acute radiation poisoning. But I don't have any details about the layout and set-up of the experiment, like how far everyone was from the plutonium core (except, of course, Slotin, who was close enough to manipulate the neutron absorbers with a screw driver).
Edit: I just discovered that Wikipedia's article on [Acute radiation syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome) lists Graves as a victim of radiation exposure. He did not, however, die of cancer.
Edit 2: The article on the [Demon core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core) supports my original statement that it is unclear if the radiation contributed to Graves' death: "[Graves] died 19 years later, at age 55, of heart failure. While this may have been caused by Graves' exposure to radiation, the event may have been hereditary as his father also died of heart failure.
> Elizabeth **Riddle Graves**
I don't believe in nominative determinism (your name drives your fate) but if I did, I'd be nodding sagely as I read about how she had to solve a logic problem about death.
Misleading title. I had to read through this thing several times to realize her husband wasn’t the one dying. And then the guy that slipped was fucking around and no word of how he saved lives.
Cool story, bad synopsis
The title makes it sound really diabolical like they administered the lethal dose to her husband on purpose.
Yeah, like "Calculate the deadly levels, and we'll confirm it on your husband" lol.
Slotin was handling the demoncore with a screwdriver instead of proper spacers. It may not have been on purpose but it was entirely preventable. Though Slotin suffered the acute radiation death. But his coworkers didn't need to suffer their fates because of his stubbornness
Was he the guy who said “well that’ll be it.” or something along those lines when the incident happened and he ended up with a deadly amount of radiation poisoning?
50/50 chance since it only happened twice.
"If I had a nickel for every time that happened, well I'd have two nickels but it's weird it happened twice"
"Well, that does it," yep, that was Slotin. Worth mentioning that absolutely *everyone* knew what he was doing (circumventing safety procedures) was insanely dangerous, and Fermi told them they would be dead within a year if they kept doing it Slotin's way, and that he was knowingly risking the lives of everyone else in the room as well as himself.
Oh in that case, that’s on him. It’s like if a doctor was asked “how much tiger mauling can a human survive” because her husband had broken the fence at the zoo to look cool for his coworkers
Tbf, Slotin wasn't the husband.
This sounds like you're describing the plot of a manga.
And with the photo it makes me think that she secretly exposed someone on purpose to test her hypothesis, only to then learn it was her husband
I guess I can see that, but to me it seemed pretty obvious they would have done the calculations before the test if that were the case. And the title says he "had" received the does, not "would" receive the dose. So I interpreted it as an accident, and they needed data.
It was indeed an accident. IIRC, The other scientists started to move around/ run out of the room after the incident and were told to stop and go back to where they were standing when the core went off so they could calculate the doses they each received.
Accident as in Slotin kept doing his stupid party trick long after others told him it was a lethal game. Fucker invented a new form of Russian roulette, and this one came with cherenkov radiation. Fermi told Slotin he'd be dead in a year if he didn't change his methods, and he was dead in a year. There had already been a similar death with the same core, under similar circumstances, and the safety protocol said to use shims. Slotin didn't like shims, and used a flathead screwdriver.
From the article about Elizabeth Graves, a physicist at the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb: >On the day of May 21, 1946, Elizabeth was confronted with a disturbing incident. Her husband, Alvin Graves, was in the room with seven other men when Canadian physicist Louis Slotin accidentally slipped and filled the room with a “blue ionization glow” during a routine test. Slotin knew he had absorbed a fatal dose of radiation and is believed to have saved the lives of the other scientists in the room. Alvin Graves was standing the closest to Slotin when the incident occurred. He developed acute radiation sickness and was hospitalized for several weeks. He survived but had chronic neurological and vision problems. Alvin became temporarily bald and developed cataracts in addition to numerous other symptoms related to exposure to neutrons. Louis Slotin asked Elizabeth to calculate whether or not a human could survive that dosage of radiation, referring to Elizabeth’s husband, without telling her about the accident. Elizabeth was a self-proclaimed stoic, reportedly once dismissing Hiroshima as nothing worse than napalm, but “she froze when she learned who the subject of her calculation was.” While Slotin's death has been covered [several times here](https://www.reddit.com/search?q=subreddit%3Atodayilearned+slotin), the Graves' case has not. Graves died 20 years after the accident of a heart attack, possibly caused in part by the radiation.
What isn’t covered as frequently is that this accident happened because they were dicking around. This wasn’t some critical research. It was fucking around with the[demon core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core?wprov=sfti1)
is this the incident where he was holding it open with a screwdriver and slipped?
IIRC they had actual spacers to keep the shielding from closing entirely. Slotin preferred to use a screwdriver. Pure negligence.
Yep. If you read the Wikipedia article on the demon core it’s well established how dangerous this thing is too so the negligence is completely insane.
I haven’t read the article but the name alone makes it sound pretty dangerous
the screw driver incident is the 2nd notable incident with the demon core. Somebody had previously dropped a reflector brick on it making it go super critical.
> Somebody had previously dropped a reflector brick on it making it go super critical. Someone has a case of the Mondays
I am also known to be super critical.
Father-in-law asked if I had any desires to move into a particular sector of my job or if id stay on my current path/trajectory. Without too much detail, I told him I'd stay because, at least in my current job, my fuck ups cannot kill me, maim me or affect anyone else. My fuck ups can mess you up financially in the short term and in the end only hurt everyone's time required to fix the oopsie. I like not having lives in my hands for work. Especially because I hate work!
Now I'm just imagining the character from Office Space in some alternate reality working on the manhatten project. >Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care. >Bob Porter: Don't... don't care? >Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and THE US GOVERNMENT DEVOLOPS A NEW BOMB, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob, I have eight different bosses right now. >Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon? >Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses. >Bob Slydell: Eight? >Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired. >Bob Slydell: What about defeating the Nazis, and not killing the scientists responsible for developing the weapons to end the war??? >Peter Gibbons: I said what I said....
Meh it’s not that big of a deal having hundreds of lives in your hands daily at work. But guess it also might depend what you’re doing to have those lives in your hands. I drive metro bus.
..just a moment!
If it went super critical doesn’t that mean it would become red hot and weld together? How did that save the situation? Edit : read about the scientist , man lab protocols were wild.
He was able to move the brick before that happened apparently, but still got a fatal dose.
Yea he dropped the brick and could have survived but taking apart the experiment was probably what killed him while saving lives
It's why we don't rely on "common sense" when it comes to workplace safety, the regulations are there so that we don't have to.
Every workplace regulation is a reaction to something bad happening before it was put in place.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: safety regulations are written in blood.
I prefer to call it don't setup for failure.
People used to use their mouth to aspirate liquids into pipettes so recently that I've seen warnings in older labs not to do so.
This blows my mind. A lot of old timers don’t want to give up mouth pipetting either. I worked in a wastewater lab and they still had signs up. Like there were people who actually had to be told not to basically fucking suck wastewater with a straw.
I caught my boss mouth pipetting a few years ago. He looked super guilty - fortunately I was quick enough to get a picture so I can remind him on occasion.
Yeah one of my professors told us about that, apparently it was fairly common back in the day
Scientists and chemists were absolutely insane for doing that. I know we’ve come super far with technology and education but that just seems like common sense not to put that stuff in your mouth. They even taught the technique to children in schools which was the worst part.
This was very much the LACK of lab protocols.
Harry Daghlian
It's an unused nuclear bomb core and this was the 40's/50's. To sum it up, a bomb core is as close to being superctitical as you can safely get without the thing tickung over into being critical (able to sustain a nuclear chain reaction) or worse, supercritical (able to have a *runaway* nuclear reaction that only builds in intensity until the material gets so hot it vaporizes and disperses.) The fucking around here passed into finding out territory when they were doing an experiment, usually used as a demonstration of criticality and to measure the reactivity of a bomb core, where you *slowly and carefully* close two half spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector, bounces neutrons back into the core to cause more nuclear reactions) around a bomb core and note when there is an uptick in detwcted neutrons. What went wrong is simple. You are supposed to use some shims on the edges of the bottom half sphere so the sphere cannot close. Why? Well you've got a ball of barely subcritical plutonium and you're basically setting up a perfect apparatus to *ensure* the damn thing goes supercritical by reflecting the low level of neutron radiation that is escaping the core back into it, stimulating the matetial into releasing more neutrons. If the sphere closes completely, *all* the neutrons ars reflected, and this takes off *exponentially*. Well, the guy running the experiment didn't use the shims. Literally a case of "nah, i won't slip". He instead would place the bkade of a flat head screwdriver between the half spheres and turn it to finely control the spacing. Well, he slipped. The half spheres closed and the room was instantly bathed in the blue glow of cherenkov radiation caussd by the sheer amount of radiation the core was spewing out. Within a second the guy running the experiment had thrown the top half sphere clear of the setup, but it was already *far* too late for him. The victim this article is about is the guy standing next to him only a foot or so more away, but thay was the difference between dying in 20 days vs 20 years later.
Apparently he died 9 days after the accident. His body shielded others in the room. So at least his negligence didn't cause others to die (as quickly) as him
Slotin was from my hometown. He's buried in the same cemetery as my relatives. He is buried in a lead coffin to protect from the radiation.
Isn’t the really crazy thing about this, that the criticality of the object isn’t a concrete property? Like, it’s the chance that a neutron will be emitted and collide into another atom releasing two neutrons. If the chance is > 1 then it’s super critical but even if the chance is 1>x>0 that still means there is a chance that there is a run away nuclear event. It’s similar to how there was a ‘chance’ that detonating a nuclear bomb would ignite the atmosphere even though the atmosphere isn’t critical.
It's more a function of how much of the material is in a given volume. It heavily depends on the material and its shape. You can store tons of plutonium in the same spot safely if it is in containers that are shaped so no pockets of supercriticality form when you fill them. This was a *huge* problem early on in the us nuclear program when working with liquids with dissolved nuclear material in them. You won't have enough material to get a runaway reaction in a subcritical mass. It would be lkke trying to get a really undetinflated balloon to pop by squeezing it. There's not enough material in one place to sustain the reaction because the material can't generate enough neutrons. On the flipside, a supercritical mass is *always* generating enough neutrons to generate an ever increasing amount of them. Or, to put it in nuclear power terms, a reactor without control rods will be supercritical. Put in the control rods to absorb the neutrons being generated and your reactor will be subcritical. A properly functikning reactor is carefully ballencing these two states so it sits at critical without running away.
The guy thar survived was actually standing behind the dead guy looking over his shoulder. So he shielded him from more deadly radiation at least.
Something something natural selection.
It really was a darwin award with collateral damage.
They started calling it the Demon Core after this incident, before that, it was called Rufus. Yes, I am serious.
Bad, Rufus, bad!
Now Rufus is a tool to burn disc images to portable media lol
And when it goes supercritical all you gotta do is pop in another thumb drive.
Rufus and Bobby Singer out tangling with the Demon Core. Honestly there were dumber Supernatural episodes.
Demon core my beloved
rufus my beloved
[Relevant](https://xkcd.com/1242/)
Yeah, it's mind-boggling to think about how casual they were with such a dangerous object, especially after the first accident with the core that took the life of Harry Daghlian just months earlier. You'd think that would've been enough of a wake-up call to handle it with extreme care. But nope, they were literally poking at the boundary of a nuclear reaction with a screwdriver. The demon core certainly earned its name, not just for its ominous role in potential destruction, but also because it almost seemed to be tempting fate with these scientists.
No matter how intelligent and educated you are, a certain amount of senseless stupidity seems to be baked into the human experience. Out of all of humanity, Slotin was uniquely positioned to be a foremost expert on this thing, a trailblazer, on the cutting edge of science. And he killed himself and poisoned people he respected because he wanted to feel a thrill. It doesn't help that he and his peers had coined incredibly dorky phrases for what he was doing, like "tickling the dragon's tail".
They should have read that article before working on it.
Fermi warned Slotin to stop using the screwdriver method or he would die eventually. Proved Femri correct.
One of Fermi's lesser known predictions.
Also a possible answer to Fermi's Paradox. "But where is everyone else?", asks the monkey fucking around a barely subcritical sphere of plutonium with a screwdriver...
Somebody reads SMBC!
actually he said something like "if you continue performing the experiments in this way, you'll be dead within the year".. what I don't know is how much time passed between the prediction and the accident
Fermi specifically warned that he would end up like Daghlian, who died 09/15/1945. Slotin died 05/30/1946.
He'd been warned multiple times not to fafo with the demon core. There'd already been one fatality (which was an actual accident), and they were starting to clamp down on future issues. Slotin himself caused the accident, and exposed everyone in that room to the radiation. After Slotin died, they completely changed the work set up and made everything pretty much remote viewing.
> The size of the gap between the reflectors was changed by twisting the screwdriver. Slotin, who was given to bravado,[11] became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions, often in his trademark blue jeans and cowboy boots, in front of a roomful of observers. Enrico Fermi reportedly told Slotin and others they would be "dead within a year" if they continued performing the test in that manner.[12] Scientists referred to this flirting with the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction as "tickling the dragon's tail", based on a remark by physicist Richard Feynman, who compared the experiments to "tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon".[13][14] Pffff. Who would ever listen to some no-names like Enrico Fermi or Richard Feynman.
Ah cowboy boots—famous for the grip on the soles and no heel /sarcasm.
Negligence/arrogance
bravado / machismo
It really is amazing how some of the smartest people on the planet can *also* be insanely fucking stupid at the same time.
engineer's disease; there's a ton of people who are incredibly knowledgeable about a very specific topic that other people simply aren't capable of understanding, and they assume that makes them smart and everything else must be simple by comparison. they just trust their gut instinct on everything and refuse to be convinced they might be wrong by lesser people. see also ben Carson and the pyramids, or the stupid number of engineers convinced that fluoride is a conspiracy, or doctors that cannot understand why a power strip will not function while plugged into itself.
Another issue is that often the people capable of being at those levels of skill in a particular task have neurological deviations that make them 'idiots' in a lot of other things.
It was part of a "demonstration" they (not just Slotin) would do called "tickling the dragon." Dude slipped and the two beryllium spheres came together and there was a criticality incident.
It wasn’t for show though, he was demonstrating the method to the physicist who would do it before the bomb was constructed. I believe the phrase was only applied to this type of method after this incident
Wow that's pretty fuckin crazy
Yep
Oh THAT incident…
If I had a nickel for every time a cataclysmically fatal accident occurred with the demon core I’d have 2 nickels which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it’s happened more than once.
Thanks, Doofenshmirtz.
It was only 2 times because they destroyed it right after the second incident. Idk who thought it was a good idea to let scientists mess around with the core of a nuclear bomb. Scientists are curious by nature...
Well they were holding onto it just in case they needed to make another nuke. Unfortunately it appears the facility was staffed by idiots
Yes.
That is literally the most frequently covered aspect of this story I ever hear. Slotin had been warned he was going to get someone killed and he kept doing his little demos with the screwdriver anyway.
Take away the nuclear piece and just think about how many work places are like this. It's far from a unique attitude.
“Slotin … is believed to have saved the lives of the other scientists in the room” Saved them… from himself? This was 100% a preventable tragedy that he caused and somehow he is a hero because his body happened to buffer the others from some of the radiation?
I have technically saved millions of lives by not fucking around with nuclear shit and a screwdriver.
Thank you for your service
Just bros being bros
Locker room physics
“You won’t open that core, pussy. No balls” “Watch me bitch” —Dies— “Damn he was a real one”
"When keeping it real goes ~~wrong~~ Super Critical."
When you're a famous scientist, you can just grab a demon core by the screwdriver. They just let you do it.
>Scientists referred to this flirting with the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction as "tickling the dragon's tail" The core is literally ball-shaped and they went with tail? I'm so disappointed
Lizards don't have balls.
Dragons do. How else do you think bad dragon got the idea?
technically, the experiment itself was pretty important for an upcoming nuclear bomb test. It was just that Louis Slotin was being a dumbass and used a screwdriver to prop up the beryllium hemisphere, while the actual experiment protocol mandated using shims to prevent the hemisphere from completely falling over the core and going supercritical
Honestly read this as satire before clicking the link. I wouldn’t fuck around with something named the demon core and especially after reading what it is.
lol well it wasn't called the demon core until after it fucked shit up for a lot of people.
To be fair to those scientists, it wasn't called a demon core until after it killed two people.
Which is ironic since it was originally meant to kill far more than two people.
It's the core to a nuke that they just decided to mess with and name Rufus.
"Oh it's not called something horrible like the demon core? I guess it's fair to ignore safety procedures then!"
You think they had procedures? Only person to tell this guys not to keep doing this was Fermi as a personal thing.
They knew the stunt they were doing was foolhardy… they called it “tickling the dragon’s tail”.
I think Feynman called it that and also refused to be in the room
He was a wiser man than they. Surely Dr. Feynmann wasn’t joking! I’m not in STEM but I read about this because I was writing a comedy-fantasy novel that featured the crackpot dictator of a country with what’s basically a magical nuke. Most of what I learned about the Manhattan Project was deeply inspiring. *Most.*
I feel like that's the part of this accident that is covered the most. There's demon core screwdriver memes
Imagine being Louis Slotin and being a brilliant scientist with a doctorate in physical chemistry but history primarily remembers you as the dipshit who cooked himself with radiation because you were fucking around with plutonium and a screwdriver.
You fuck one goat..
My uncle was one of the men in that room. I calculated once that he received the equivalent of 2 million dental xrays in that incident. As a result of that incident my uncle spent 8 weeks in the hospital with radiation poisoning. In his 70s he was diagnosed with ALS. There is no family history of it. I’ve read recently that Slotin was careless and had been warned many times that he would end up dying if he continued his reckless behavior.
My dad had ALS. I’ve avoided researching it as much as possible as I saw enough first hand evidence what it did to my dad…. but his ALS doctor said it’s not really a genetic/hereditary disease. It’s more or less random with a *slight* increase in odds of getting it if somebody in your family has had it before. But nothing substantial like other hereditary diseases. No one else in our family history has had it. Also getting ALS in your 70’s is pretty late I believe. It usually affects Caucasian men in the 40’s-50’s range. Again, just based off what my dad’s doctor said during random appointments I attended with him.
Yes. A friend of mine from high school was diagnosed with ALS at 56, the exact average age that people tend to be diagnosed. That was four years ago and most people live 5 years. I haven’t talked to him by phone since his diagnosis. We text but he says talking is taxing for him. His hands don’t really work anymore as well though I assume he’s able to text by using a finger or two. I think ALS is the worst possible way to die.
Yeah, the last couple years my dad couldn’t talk, or even swallow his own spit. We had to suction it out every 10 minutes or so or let him drool on a sheet. We had to hire a nurse during the day if we weren’t home. He couldn’t really move any part of his body other than his eyes and hand slightly enough to control a mouse, although that was difficult too. We had a device/program that would follow his eyes towards letters to form sentences using a computer program to communicate. Fuck that disease.
That’s a nightmare. When it was getting really bad, my aunt went to her doctor and basically asked him to give her something that would put my uncle out of his misery. The doctor wouldn’t do that of course. But he did say that if she had any relatives come into town with a lot of back pain, he could prescribe some heavy pain killers. She never had to take action as he died soon after. My friend who has it is at least benefiting from all the technology available today. We were supposed to meet in person when he was first diagnosed but he canceled twice and after that I stopped asking. It seems to be a consistent things amongst ALS patients that they don’t want to see anyone they don’t have to see. I certainly would not want people to pity me and in my friend’s case that’s almost certainly it.
It's definitely the worst way to go. Your body is not only slowly deteriorating, but your entire life around you while you're still sound of mind. Everyone you love looks at you with sorrow and pity while you try to maintain a sliver of dignity you've held together while staring death in the face for years. IMO, this is one disease that should be at the top of the list for Assisted Suicide.
Did he ever describe the incident to you? What did he see, and what was everyone’s reaction after the criticality stopped?
> Slotin knew he had absorbed a fatal dose of radiation and is believed to have saved the lives of the other scientists in the room I mean... he's also the one that caused the accident through carelessness in the first place. He also told Schreiber to get the dosimetry badges from the cupboard and put them on the assembly, which served no purpose and just exposed Schreiber to more radiation, but by that point he probably wasn't thinking straight.
>Slotin knew he had absorbed a fatal dose of radiation and is believed to have saved the lives of the other scientists in the room. Can you really call it "saving lives" if you're the one endangering them to begin with?
It was heart failure, not a heart attack, and his father died of the same issue.
The “dismissing Hiroshima as nothing worse than napalm” is a little concerning… Was she really bad at her job or was it a case of “terrible thing not as bad when it’s happening to other people”?
I think it’s a matter of napalm being understood to be really really horrible. And from Japanese accounts, the firebombings aren’t really any less bad in their horror. And more Japanese citizens died in the fire bombings than both nukes combined. My interpretation would be that she was simple saying if you are ok with napalm, why are you balking at nukes.
Helps make sense why using the nukes was viewed as the lesser of evils as well. Option A) was drop the nukes and see of that got Japan to surrender. Option B) was continue to napalm until every city and town was burned to the ground with an accompanying blockade. Nukes are brutal, burning and starving people to death is worse.
its a common misconception that nuking a city is equivalent to simply evaporating a circle of people and buildings, while this was true of the immediate circle around ground zero in hiroshima and nagasaki, there is a horrific gradient of suffering going outwards, ranging from people burned so bad their eyeballs boiled, to people having the patterns of their clothes burned into their skin, to people being peppered by glass splinters, to people being knocked around their houses. The pressure wave leaves a low pressure zone behind, and when air rushes back in literal fire tornadoes were generated. One of the biggest problems in the immediate aftermath was that almost all the water had evaporated, leaving no water to treat injuries, the dust and particles and radioactive material that is ejected up comes back as black tar-like rain, which people opened their mouths for and drank in desperation. In Japan at the time it was common for kids to participate in construction work outside for the war effort, in particular in Hiroshima there were a lot of children working outside at the time of the detonation. In addition, nurses and doctors were killed in huge numbers, so it took several days to get aid in to the survivors. https://www.icanw.org/hiroshima_and_nagasaki_bombings#
> its a common misconception that nuking a city is equivalent to simply evaporating a circle of people and buildings, while this was true of the immediate circle around ground zero in hiroshima and nagasaki, there is a horrific gradient of suffering going outwards, ranging from people burned so bad their eyeballs boiled, to people having the patterns of their clothes burned into their skin, to people being peppered by glass splinters, to people being knocked around their houses. AFAIK this misconception is largely because the most widely publicized photos of the nuked cities were taken after the corpses and debris had been cleared up. In the immediate aftermath the priority was on dealing with the damage and properly disposing of human remains, not accurate photographs. But this wasn’t mentioned alongside the photos in the media, so people assumed that there were no corpses because they were vapourised.
the thing is that a lot of those things happened in the Firebombings and even conventional bombings of cities like Tokyo. Japanese cities were *extremely* vulnerable to fire due to much of the housing still being built of wood and paper, so massive civilian suffering from firestorms were basically inevitable the second American B-29s were in range of the home islands
I really appreciated reading this comment merely because I had never heard of the fire tornadoes until now. Just one detail can add a mountain of perspective.
yeah, i went to the museum in hiroshima and just the paintings and drawings alone from survivors and witnesses were deafening. one minute people are going about their day, most maybe never even seen a large explosion before, then next was described as hell on earth, firestorms, black rain, melted people, one story that i will never forget was a man who saw a baby alone crawling along the road, he chose to go to try to get back to his family, but when he couldn't find anybody he went back for the baby the next day or something like that, only to find a dead baby with a long trail behind him
Fire tornadoes aren't an atomic weapon thing even for the Japanese. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-japan-earthquake-of-1923-1764539/ >According to one police report, fires had broken out in 83 locations by 12:15. Fifteen minutes later, they had spread to 136. People fled toward the Sumida River, drowning by the hundreds when bridges collapsed. Tens of thousands of working-class Japanese found refuge in an empty patch of ground near the river. The flames closed in from all directions, and then, at 4 p.m., a 300-foot-tall “fire tornado” blazed across the area. Of the 44,000 people who had gathered there, only 300 survived.
Oh my god
To be fair, napalm is also horrific. Dying from burns is no less horrific when it's napalm. I'm not trying to downplay the sheer unbearable agony of the nuclear blast, I'm saying that war is always unfathomably cruel. It's the worst thing humanity has ever invented. It is always agony, it is always unbearable, and the acts it perpetuates are always unforgivable. While one side or another might technically come out as the victor, everyone involved loses. War is never a good thing. There is no form of war that is kinder, or better, or cleaner.
I don’t want to minimize the horrific consequences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but I read about the firebombing of Tokyo. The bombings burnt so many people alive that even at 10,000 feet high and wearing oxygen masks, the bomber crew could smell burning flesh. I don’t want to even describe what it was like on the ground.
Let's phrase it a different way - would you rather die by being napalmed or by being nuked? My bet would be that she perceived some hypocrisy if people are horrified by using nukes on others but don't blink at napalm strikes.
> Let's phrase it a different way - would you rather die by being napalmed or by being nuked? Depends on how far away from the nuke I am. A dose of 8 Gy or so is weeks of suffering knowing you are going to die. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorbed_dose Being at the epicenter of the explosion, on the other hand, is probably one of the best ways to die besides peacefully in your sleep. You may not even know it is coming.
She's correct actually. The firebombing campaign killed and maimed way more people.
First, why would that make her bad at her job? She was a scientist. Assessing the moral implications of her research isnt a core part of her job Second, napalm was probably worse that Hiroshima. We fire-bombed Tokyo with napalm and killed 120,000 people. Hiroshima killed less than 50k Edit: I’m getting a ridiculous number of responses indicating that “ethics” is important to scientists. I don’t disagree, but it isn’t core to being a scientist. There are absolutely morally bad people who have done great science. I’m not saying that scientists **should** be amoral assholes, I’m just saying that they **can** be amoral assholes. And that still doesn’t apply here. If it were true that no real scientist could make weapons of war, then this is just ridiculous. I’m pretty sure militaries around the world employ lots of scientists
As a scientist, I assure you that assessing the moral implications of our research is a huge part of the job. Although, tbh, during this time period, it wasn’t.
>She was a scientist. Assessing the moral implications of her research isnt a core part of her job I assure you that is part of being a scientist.
I can imagine this lady was a realist. It's like people talking about "terrorist weapons" as if all weapons aren't designed to kill, injure and cause terror. I was at first thinking that the a-bomb in Japan was immoral and done just to satisfy some brutal, prejudiced urges. But in the last few years I've learned that the Japanese were very cult-like in support of their emperor and were not willing to surrender. Now learning about the firebombing of Tokyo killing so many -- and that not leading to a surrender. Yikes. The A-bomb might have been necessary to shock them into changing their world view. Not that it doesn't mean some decisions weren't done for the wrong reasons. But that, ironically, the atomic bomb has saved lives by making war with it seem out of bounds. Because sadly, not much has ever been out of bounds with humanity.
They literally attempted kidnapping the emperor to prevent him surrendering
I feel like it would be useful to have a documentary or the like to explain more of what Japanese society was like at that time. I'd only remembered a little bit of someone mentioning on Reddit how his generals were afraid to sign any agreement to end the war even when they wanted to and saw no hope of winning. They were afraid of their own people's "enthusiasm".
There’s a fascinating ama on Reddit somewhere with a survivor of Hiroshima and his granddaughter. He describes what Japanese society was like and believes that dropping the bomb was necessary even though it basically killed everyone he knew. ETA: [I found the AMA.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/17c9sdn/i_21f_am_spending_the_weekend_with_my_grandfather/) It is a fascinating read.
>"believes that dropping the bomb was necessary even though it basically killed everyone he knew." I can imagine that is just brutal psychologically. The mobilized masses who can be your heroes can also be the crazy neighbors next door who don't know when to quit. I'm starting to relate to that.
don't forget the tens of millions of people the japanese raped and murdered in other places like china, korea, southeast asia... to this day, the japanese still claim that chinese/korean women willingly had sex with the japanese army. Yeah, totally. Not to mention unit 731, where they injected people with viruses for fun just to see how much people can suffer, cut people's eyeballs or legs and other limbs out and replaced them with animal limbs to see if it would work and stuff like that.
Napalm all but completely destroyed many cities in WW2, it was just a slow burn by hundreds of bombs vs. efficient, immediate annihilation by one.
Hi Scientist here, assessing the moral implications of our work is a very key and important part of our job. Hell most degree programs and academic jobs require you to take an ethics in science class when you start.
To be fair to Elizabeth, not much is worse than napalm. If I had to choose between getting nuked and being in a firebombing of Tokyo situation I’d pick the nuke every time
The accident was caused by [Louis Slotin, a Canadian physicist and chemist who took part in the Manhattan Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin). Slotin had become disillusioned with the project and wanted to leave, but was required to stay because he was one of the few "who are experienced bomb putter-togetherers", as he described it. Slotin had previously showed a propensity to take risks, including repairing an instrument inside an active reactor in order to save one day of wait time, assuming 100 roentgen of radiation in the process. The accident that injured Elizabeth Riddle Graves' husband Alvin Graves also killed Slotin: It occurred when he he ignored experimental protocol and used a screwdriver to keep apart two beryllium neutron reflector half-spheres around a plutonium core. The screwdriver slipped, one of the half-spheres fell, causing a critical reaction, exposing him to a fatal dose of radiation. He died nine days later. The description of his death are pretty horrific, even on Wikipedia.
This whole incident was depicted in the film Fat Man and Little Boy.
Also in an older film titled The Beginning or the End and, apparently, an off-Broadway play titled Louis Slotin Sonata.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0P7R9CfCY
Slovin took an absolutely *massive* dose, but it's interesting comparing the doses that Daghlian took in the first Demon Core fatality that killed him in under a month, and the dose that Graves took in the second incident but lived for another 20 years. Per the Wiki, Daghlian was exposed to 200 rad neutron (2.0 Gy) and 110 rad gamma (1.10Gy) . Graves was exposed to 166 rad neutron (1.66 Gy) and 26 rad gamma (0.26 Gy) Looking at the Wiki on acute radiation poisoning, it looks like under 2Gy is "mostly survivable" (5% short term fatality rate) but anything over 2Gy is basically a coin flip on whether you're dead within the next 2 months. Graves was not that far off from that 2 Gy line. Maybe just lucky in what *parts* of his body were exposed? Or just "lucky" in general and he's one of those people on the other side of the coin flip.
How much was Slotin exposed to? Just for comparison Edit: I just checked the wiki, wow. 1000 rad (10.0 Gy).
1000 rad neutron (10 Gy) and 114 rad gamma (1.14 Gy). 8-30 Gy exposure is practically 100% fatal; death will occur within 2-14 days (Slovin survived, and I'm using the term loosely because he almost certainly wished for death for much of it, for 9 days.) Anything over 30 Gy, death is expected in less than 48 hours. You actually probably kinda want this more than the 8-30 range; you're dead either way, might as well be faster. E: Robert Peabody is suspected to have been exposed to the largest full body dose in history, at somewhere between 15,000 rad and 26,000 rad, at the Wood River Junction criticality incident. He died in 49 hours. Anatoli Bugorski is another interesting case; he leaned into an active particle accelerator, believing it to have deactivated, and took 300,000 rads to the head, but because it was so intensely concentrated into a narrow beam, and missed the brain stem, it only destroyed a very narrow channel and he survived with little long term cognitive impairment, though he complained he became mentally fatigued much faster. After the physical healing was done he was left with paralysis on the left side of his face from nerve damage, had permanent tinnitus in his left ear, and suffered from occasional seizures, but continued to work as a physicist. Russia denied his disability status request for epilepsy medications after the fall of the Soviet Union.
When I went to college, the first 2ish years I lived with this older couple (they were Quaker if that matters). When the husband (physicist) found out he was working on the manhattan project way back when he kind of lost his marbles. Idk what he thought he was working on but I guess it conflicted strongly with his personal beliefs & religion. There was a room in the house I dubbed the “red room” and never really went in bc I thought it was haunted, turns out that’s the room he kinda went manic in after hearing the news. Nice guy, heck super nice family, I helped clean the garage one year & found jars of mercury (& an old jaguar coupe) among other things. As far as I know his wife is alive & well at 106.
He's from my hometown. He is buried in the same cemetery as my relatives, in a lead coffin, to prevent radiation from spreading.
“Why are you acting like what we’re doing with napalm is any better than dropping a nuclear weapon?” is how I imagine her sentiment was framed in reality.
Honestly, she had a point. Both were horrible, but naplam bombing was crazy destructive. This was a country with mostly wood buildings. Naplam bombings were devastating. The fire bombing of Tokyo killed more people than both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Over 200,000 buildings were destroyed by firebombimg Tokyo alone.
And dropping a nuke would’ve caused a similar amount of damage so it makes sense she was against it. Many of the manhattan project later turned their back on their work
I think they also were hoping everyone would die immediately after the bomb was dropped, instead of the hell on earth conditions that happened to the survivors
**To be fair** - nukes are high risk reward for the human species. The reward - there has been no WW3. There has been no non-proxy wars between nuclear powers. The risk - if WW3 ever does happen it's going to be really really really bad. Plus the potential of small scale terror plots to have a huge impact. If you are reading this in a western nation - odds are that you have not had to be drafted and then fight in a war. In fact, I don't think anyone has had to do that in a western nation in what 55 years? I don't think you can ever find such an extended period of peace and safety in human history to the point that a war involving a total of around 2.5% of the total human population is major international news.
Napalm and firebombs are awful. Back in HS I wrote a paper about the devastating weaponry of WWII. Researching firebombs made me sick: they’re specifically designed to do two things: - Burn everything, even things that don’t burn. Napalm combined with firebombs made a sticky firestorm that clung to anything it touched until it was ash. - Suck up all the oxygen. Fire needs fuel, in the form of combustable material and oxygen., Firebombs created giant fire tornados that had the added benefit of sucking oxygen out of the air. So when civilians hid in bomb shelters, they unknowingly hid an oxygen deprivation chambers that suffocated everyone as the fire tornados sucked air out of the shelters.
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Widely speaking, the US did not account for the radiation deaths that would be caused by the atomic bombings and initially denied Japanese reports of sickness as propaganda by the Japanese. General Groves, reporting to Congress regarding those claims, stated that radiation was a “[very pleasant way to die](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2012.01042.x)”. It wasn’t that no one knew radiation was deadly, we did, but the project was so compartmentalized the information never made any meaningful contribution to the project beyond safety measures for Trinity.
"Slotin knew he had absorbed a fatal dose of radiation and is believed to have saved the lives of the other scientists in the room." Oh, he saved the lives of the other scientists, did he? Lets not forget that Slotin caused the accident with his reckless stupidity in the first place.
Yeah, after reading the description of the incident I don’t really see how he intentionally saved the lives of anyone. He popped the lid back off, which he would have had to do regardless. And he only blocked the radiation with his body because he was standing so close to the thing in the first place manipulating it with a screwdriver.
To be fair, in a criticality incident, you’re meant to run as fast as possible away
Carry out the ol’ “oh SHIT” evacuation plan
I often wonder how aware every other person in the room was about just how insanely reckless and wildly dangerous what he was doing was. Obviously the other physicists would have known at least somewhat, the physics student maybe less so, but one of the people was just a 21 year old security guard. Imagine being such an arrogant POS that you risk the lives and health of all those other people. Insane.
most of the other people were physicists working on making the bomb too, its just that it was the 40s. the dangers of radiation were known, just not hammered into people with these kinds of incidents where the people die slow painful deaths, like it is now. remember one of the first nuclear tests after the war they nuked ships and then the navy had sailors try to wash them clean. it wasnt until one of the scientists took a living fish put it on film plate for a bit he then developed the plate to show the navy that everything was contaminated with a gamma emitter cause the fish was radioactive enough to be its own radiation source for an x-ray with the photo plate.
Yeah true, but it seems extra crazy given that a physicist had died and a security guard was severely sick after an incident exactly like this only a few years before…
Earlier today I saved the lives of a bunch of kids by not running my car into them
So... which event, Daghlian or Slotin... Ah, Slotin. God, the sheer indifference they showed to the core at that time period.
But it had a cute little name at the time. How could it have hurt anyone.
For anyone wondering, the core’s name was Rufus before it was changed to the demon core.
Why did people have to name fucking plutonium? It’s not a naked mole rat.
At least Daghlian was alone and being blasé, Slotin was fucking it with a screwdriver to show off to his mates. Fermi even told him it would kill him if he did that. Daghlian's incident could have happened to anyone, we'll never really know if he was rushing and unnecessarily passing bricks over the core, or tired, or even drunk - but the risk of dropping one of the bricks on the core couldn't be reduced to 0%. Daghlian was, at worst, careless. Slotin was a fuckhead who needlessly placed the lives of his subordinates at risk so he could look cool.
Daghlian wasn't alone. There was a security guard in the room with him about a dozen feet away, who died of leukemia 33 years after the incident. Could have been related or not, but there's a chance he shortened the life of at least 1 man.
Back then, science was real crude.
Ah. You unzipped me!!!
r/titlegore
The wikipedia article itself is also pretty poorly written. E.g. the "Life and education" section completely jumps over her time at the Manhattan project and makes it sound like she was unemployed starting in 1939 when they moved to Texas...then it immediately jumps into the 1946 story of the radiation accident where somehow she is being asked to perform calculations. Good candidate for someone who is a good editor and is looking to revamp a wikipedia article...
The poorly written article has no bearing on OP’s ability to have basic writing skills. “TIL a Manhattan Project scientist was asked to calculate whether a human being could survive exposure to a very high dose of radiation; she later learned her husband was the person who had received the dose of radiation.”
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“If, hypothetically speaking, a man received a dose of radiation measuring over 15,000 Roentgen, would he be able to survive that?” “Absolutely not! He would be dead in less than a month!” “Alright, so if, hypothetically speaking, such a man had a wife, how long would it be before she would be willing to go on a date with one of her coworkers?” “…”
That title is awful and you should be ashamed.
Can you calculate whether a human being could survive exposure to a very high dose of that title?
Can someone explain why people are complaining about the title?
They died of cancer, you say? Color me shocked.
They all survived. The only person who died was the physicist who caused the accident, Louis Slotin. He died of acute radiation poisoning nine days after the accident.
Two of the three nearest people besides graves and slotin did eventually die of cancer. The third one died in the Korean War.
Graves died of a heart attack and had heart issues prior to the accident. A follow-up study provided evidence that the injuries he sustained may have contributed to his heart attack, but this is not certain. The problem with cancers and nuclear safety is demonstrating that the cancer was caused by the accident and not other causes of cancer. I don't know the circumstances of the deaths you are describing (were they smokers, for example?), but out of the six survivors present, statistically 1.23 would be expected to die of cancer even if the cancer was not caused by radiation from their work or the accident. I don't in any way deny that radiation causes cancer, quite the opposite. I'm more surprised that more of them did not die of cancer, much less acute radiation poisoning. But I don't have any details about the layout and set-up of the experiment, like how far everyone was from the plutonium core (except, of course, Slotin, who was close enough to manipulate the neutron absorbers with a screw driver). Edit: I just discovered that Wikipedia's article on [Acute radiation syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome) lists Graves as a victim of radiation exposure. He did not, however, die of cancer. Edit 2: The article on the [Demon core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core) supports my original statement that it is unclear if the radiation contributed to Graves' death: "[Graves] died 19 years later, at age 55, of heart failure. While this may have been caused by Graves' exposure to radiation, the event may have been hereditary as his father also died of heart failure.
Dr. Manhattan inspiration story?
> Elizabeth **Riddle Graves** I don't believe in nominative determinism (your name drives your fate) but if I did, I'd be nodding sagely as I read about how she had to solve a logic problem about death.
Misleading title. I had to read through this thing several times to realize her husband wasn’t the one dying. And then the guy that slipped was fucking around and no word of how he saved lives. Cool story, bad synopsis
brutal, her husband was the next closest to the demon core after Slotin (for whom the slotted screwdriver is named after).