A careless slip led to a fatal accident in the Manhattan Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36798594 - July 2023 (1 comment)
The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36022373 - May 2023 (59 comments)
The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25317021 - Dec 2020 (1 comment)
Demon Core: The Strange Death of Louis Slotin (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744425 - Aug 2019 (22 comments)
Demon Core - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20205876 - June 2019 (55 comments)
The blue flash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754713 - May 2016 (1 comment)
Demon Core: The Strange Death of Physicist Louis Slotin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11749742 - May 2016 (34 comments)
- https://uk.news.yahoo.com/us-military-once-detonated-nuclear... (5 volunteers stood directly below a detonation)
> In the aftermath, the five men shake hands, congratulating each other.
> "My only regrets right now," Col. Bruce says, "are that everybody couldn't have been out here at ground zero with us."
- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/terror-and-securit... (Around 22,000 British servicemen, along with soldiers from New Zealand and Fiji, took part in the tests)
> Safety guidance on the day was, he recalls, scarce: personnel were advised to wear a hat and make sure their sleeves were rolled down. The men were then ordered to “sit down with your back towards the blast area and cover your eyes.”
> Despite assurances given at the time that the tests posed little risk to health (via radiation exposure), a significant number of veterans went on to experience significant repercussions.
- https://www.livescience.com/1698-atomic-bomb-test-exposed-ci... (First Atomic Bomb Test Exposed U.S. Civilians to Radiation)
> Because of its importance in the war, the Trinity test was conducted in secret. Little was known about the dangers of radiation exposure in the 1940s, so local residents were not warned or evacuated in advance of—or even following—the test. As a result, people in surrounding areas were exposed to radiation by breathing contaminated air, eating contaminated foods, and drinking affected water and milk. Some ranches were located within 15 miles of ground zero, and commercial crops were grown nearby.
The stories about these are not romanticised. They’re conveying our ignorance. There is nothing romantic about people dying from radiation.
> Enrico Fermi himself had warned Slotin that he would be “dead within a year” if he continued (the way he was working)
Some risks were absolutely known.
"Enrico Fermi himself had warned Slotin that he would be “dead within a year” if he continued—but the exigencies of the Second World War had privileged expediency over safety. "
It was irresponsible and kind of reckless.. especially after a similar thing had happened: "Nine months to the day before Slotin’s accident, Daghlian had been working with the very same plutonium core, performing a different criticality experiment that used tungsten-carbide blocks instead of the beryllium tamper.* He dropped one of the blocks, and the core briefly went critical. Daghlian took nearly a month to die."
My standard human behavior might have been proactively that of the guard: "But when the core started to glow and people started yelling, he promptly ran out the door and up a nearby hill. " :D
( https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/demon-co... )