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- cross-posted to:
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The Blue Flash: How a careless slip led to a fatal accident in the Manhattan Project::One day in Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project, a brief, casual moment of carelessness killed one scientist and severely injured another.
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“Careless” is an understatement.
Kyle Hill’s episode on the demon core: https://youtu.be/aFlromB6SnU
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Wish I could read the article, but I can’t seem to close the stupid pop-up (I’m using Lemmy)…
But I’m guessing it’s the real story dramatized here in “Fat Man and Little Bit.”
EDIT: Finally was able to read the article. I’m not sure why John Cusack’s character is made up in the movie, but he’s essentially a combination of the two scientists killed by the demon core.
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I thought the demon core indecent was after the Manhattan project had wrapped up? I’ll look into it further.
Edit: Yeah, it was about a year after Nagasaki. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
Some of the middle paragraphs
There are conflicting reports about what went wrong. An onlooker said Slotin’s approach on this occasion was “improvised”. Others said what he did was perfectly normal. In Schreiber’s official report, he said Slotin acted “too rapidly and without adequate consideration”, but that the others in the room “by their silence, agreed to the procedure”.
The screwdriver slipped and the upper reflector enclosed the core. The screwdriver slipped and the upper reflector enclosed the core.
“I turned because of some noise or sudden movement,” wrote Schreiber. “I saw a blue flash… and felt a heat wave simultaneously.” It seems the screwdriver had slipped and the plutonium had gone “prompt critical” as the reflector dropped down over it. It happened, as Schreiber wrote, in “a few tenths of a second.” Slotin flipped the upper reflector to the floor, but his reaction was already too late. In the moments after the accident, the room was silent.
The thought had never previously struck us… We were naive in thinking about the potential misuse of our trade… A non-human autonomous creator of a deadly chemical weapon is entirely feasible.
When we started cloning sheep, still teeming with genetic defects, a wealthy man in the middle east commissioned the cloning of himself for an heir.
Any technology we develop will inevitably be used to do the unthinkable, and it will continue to be used unethically until we have pragmatic cause not to.
This isn’t to say we shouldn’t develop such technologies – if we dont, in our hypercompetitive society, someone else will. We just need to develop counters and remedies when someone is tempted.
