Nuel Pharr
Davis describes Slotin's job:
Slotin sat at his desk amid a clutter of radiation counters. He laid the bomb-metal pieces on his desktop far enough apart to be out of range of each others' neutrons. Then, with a screwdriver, he slowly pushed them together. As he did so, each piece responded to neutrons from the other by emitting more neutrons. The effect was a progressive multiplication of neutrons that, if charted, would appear as an ascending curve. Slotin did not push the pieces all the way together. He stopped as soon as in his mind's eye he could extrapolate the ascending curve into the vertical straight line that would stand for neutron multiplication in a detonating bomb.
Interested
only in Dragon
Davis
describes Slotin as "A thin, short, blue-bristled man who usually looked
in need of a shave, [who] at age thirty-one had dark circles under his eyes,
which contrasted oddly with the heavy tan of his sunken cheeks. He seldom spoke
with much animation except about the Dragon and about his other interest, the
extrapolation of blast and radiation casualties."
The
extrapolation of radiation casualties apparently was something that not many of
the men or women at Los Alamos thought about very much. They knew there would
be radiation casualties, but they severely underestimated the extent of the
casualties, according to some recent reports.
Perhaps
some insight can be gained from Davis' book, although one must tread lightly:
the book was criticized by two knowledgeable reviewers because of some
wrongly-credited and other possibly-invented quotations.
Davis
writes that most of the scientists at Los Alamos, the weapons lab several hundred
miles north of the Jornada del Muerto, let Robert Oppenheimer, their leader,
take "protective custody of their emotions." Others may have had no
emotions that needed custody. At any rate, before the Hiroshima born was
dropped, only a few Los Alamos scientists showed any emotional reaction to the
consequences of the use of the bomb. Slotin was one who showed emotion, but not much in the way of sympathy.
In The Uranium
People, a sort of anecdotal history of the beginning of the
nuclear age, published in 1979, Leona
Marshall Libby, a Manhattan Project scientist, wrote about Slotin. She had known him from their days together at the University of
Chicago:
He and I were laboratory assistants in a second year physics course that went on several hours two afternoons a week. There were hours at a time with nothing for us to do except be there, so we spent the time talking, leaning against the warm steam radiators looking out at the snowy campus or watching the tiny spring leaves growing.
He had spent several years in Spain as member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade [in the Spanish Civil War]. It had been for him a marvelous adventure as well as a crusade.
Slotin Angered Fermi
Davis
contrasts Slotin with Enrico Fermi, who sometimes took breaks from his theoretical
calculations by working on a different
experiment in the same building with Slotin. "Fermi
had a hard, clear mind," David writes, "which liked to wrestle with only limited questions, such
as the behavior of slow and fast neutrons and high-energy particles. Slotin's behavior angered him by raising questions of a
different order."
Fermi, who
died of cancer in 1954 at the age of 53, seemed to be one whose emotions needed
no protective custody. Slotin, on the other hand, might have benefitted from
some emotional assistance, but would not have accepted such an abrogation of
responsibility, if Davis is correct.
Nonetheless,
Oppenheimer seemed to understand Slotin, perhaps because he felt much the same
way. The following paragraph from Lawrence and Oppenheimer offers a
vignette of Slotin and also some insight into the reason for Oppenheimer's success with the atomic
bomb:
In its frustration at having become the physicists' test animal, the human race should find a certain comfort in the thought that Slotin knew what he was doing. He could not have passed the most elementary personality-profile test of the kind now routinely used in government and industry. By giving Slotin responsibility and by going to relax in spiritual rapport with him in Omega [the building where the Dragon test was performed], Oppenheimer too outraged present-day administrative standards. His reason, of course, was that he wanted to build the bomb. If he had employed only sound, wholesome organization men for his project, Los Alamos would still be designing impressive remote- control machines with which to check its first implosion assembly.
Cursed Already
After the
Hiroshima bomb was dropped, things did not go well at Los Alamos. On October
16, 1945, Oppenheimer's last day as director of the laboratory, he accepted an
award from the Army for the laboratory's contribution to ending the war and
said, in a speech reproduced in Weapons and Hope (see previous post below), "If atomic bombs
are to be added to the arsenals of a warring world or to the arsenals of nations
preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of
Los Alamos and Hiroshima."
Davis takes his cue from Oppenheimer and writes:
The men in Omega showed they knew they were cursed already. Early in August, one low-grade Omega technician died in a chemical explosion and two were blinded. No further uranium bombs could be made for months, but a third plutonium bomb had been readied for the Dragon check. Slotin, sulking because Oppenheimer would not let him go see Japanese casualties at first hand, took a holiday, leaving his chief assistant Harry Daghlian, to undertake it. Daghlian, also thin, dark and morose, got an overdose of radiation and died on September 15. Slotin performed the check and several others, then next spring on May 21 gained what he seemed to long for. Poking the segments of the Bikini test bomb a little too close together, he set up a blue ionization glow in the room. Lunging from his chair, he covered the segments with his body until a half dozen observers could file out.By that time it was too late for Slotin, but the most talented woman physicist on the Mesa, Elizabeth Graves, was asked by telephone to compute the chances [for survival] of a man who had watched with his hand on Slotin's shoulder ... Elizabeth Graves was a no-nonsense type -- Hiroshima, she used to say, was no worse than napalm. Methodically she began punching a calculator, then learned from another telephone call that the subject was her husband. 'My mind went blank,' she said. 'I couldn't do the simplest sums in arithmetic.' Graves survived with cataracts. Something like superstitious terror halted further necessary Dragon checks until entirely different methods could be devised from those Oppenheimer had kept going with complete safety during the war.
Slotin died
within days of acute radiation sickness.
