He also received two tiny, round, lead and silver commemorative pins.
They are each engraved with a dominant "A" riding over the
words "BOMB" and "Manhattan Project".
Nevertheless, Slotin, to his dismay, was prevented from travelling to
the Tinian Island air base in the South Pacific, the launching site of
the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, because "he was still a Canadian
citizen several weeks short of his final American papers." However,
an officially signed 18 February 1946 Permit indicated that Slotin, now
a U.S. citizen, was slated to attend the Operation Crossroads test at
Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Despite his seeming zeal, there are hints that Slotin may not have
been enamoured of atom bombs, per se. In a 1982 Winnipeg Free
Press story journalist Val Werier writes that Slotin's father
"was astonished to hear after Hiroshima that his son had been
working on the atomic bomb:' The response was: "We had to get it
before the Germans."
Winnipeg lawyer Israel Ludwig, Slotin's nephew, recalls his mother
saying that "Uncle Lou was troubled by what he was doing" in
Los Alamos, while Beth Shore, Slotin's niece, says that during the 1960s
ban the bomb movement the family "kept quiet" about her
uncle's work at Los Alamos, especially since the accident "brought
such devastation" to the family. Furthermore, in November 1989,
Philip Morrison, in a terse note to me scribbled at the bottom of my
letter of inquiry to him, wrote that he and Slotin "talked a good
deal about war and peace." In fact, Slotin, whose talents were
still required at Los Alamos after the war, was eagerly planning to
resume peacetime research at the University of Chicago into both
biophysics and radiobiology. He had, technically, only been on a
leave-of-absence from the University of Chicago.
In a March 1946 letter to Professor Raymond E. Zirkle of the Institute
of Radiobiology and Biophysics at the University of Chicago, Slotin
revealed the dilemma confronting him: "I have become involved in
the Navy tests, much to my disgust. The reason for this is that I am one
of the few people left here who are experienced bomb putter-togetherers."
Then the fatal accident happened. It had been ominously augured by a
very similar tragedy six months earlier. Harry Daghlian, Slotin's friend
and laboratory assistant, had fallen victim to "the invisible
killer". Deeply saddened by the mishap, Slotin spent many hours at
his assistant's bedside during the month it took Daghlian to die.
Thomas Brock quotes from a June 1946 letter from Emily Morrison,
Philip Morrison's wife, to a friend. It reveals the "series of
strange coincidences" involved in both mishaps: "Both Louis'
and Harry Daghlian's accidents occurred on Tuesday the 21st; both used
the same piece of material; and both died in the same room in the
hospital."
After the 24-year-old Daghlian's death, Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi
warned Slotin that he wouldn't last a year - "if you keep doing
that experiment."
Following the Daghlian accident two tiny spacers were developed to
prevent the beryllium spheres from closing completely together. It was
hoped that this would prevent similar incidents. But Slotin preferred a
hands-on approach to experimentation.
Raemer E. Schreiber, a Slotin colleague who still lives in Los
Alamos, stated in a 1993 letter to the author:
"I'm quite sure that several of us knew that he was using the Pu
[plutonium) hemispheres for demonstrations of simple critical
assemblies, but were not aware of his unsafe method until it was too
late. After all, he was the expert in this work. But he should have
never made the assembly by lowering the upper section down onto the
lower one so a slip would close the gap and make the system
supercritical. He should have fixed the upper assembly in position and
raised the lower section gradually to increase the reactivity. Then if
anything slipped, the assembly would open harmlessly. Louis knew this,
of course, but apparently thought he could get by with the simpler
assembly."
Slotin's death ended all hands-on critical assembly work at Los
Alamos. We immediately started work on a remote control system with the
critical assembly equipment and the operating crew separated by roughly
a quarter mile. We had no more criticality deaths or injuries.
Tributes, of all sorts, came in following Slotin's death. On 14 June
1946 the Los Alamos Times published "Slotin - A
Tribute", a poem by associate editor Thomas P. Ashlock. It began:
May God receive you, great-souled scientist!
While you were with us, even strangers knew
The breadth and lofty stature of your mind
'Twas only in the crucible of death
We saw at last your noble heart revealed.
Bob Stewart, a friend and former assistant of Louis Slotin's at Oak
Ridge, expressed a sentiment shared by many: "Louis was a source of
inspiration to all of us he would always insist upon taking the greatest
risk himself. Those of us who know him know that the world has lost one
of its foremost scientists."
The Louis A. Slotin Memorial Fund was initiated in 1948 by Slotin's
colleagues at Los Alamos and the University of Chicago. A series of 15
presentations, all held at the university, were given by such
distinguished men of science as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific head
of the Manhattan Project, and Nobel Laureates Luis W. Alvarez and Hans
A. Bethe. Those memorial lectures lasted until 1962 when funds ran out.
In September 1946, in response to a request for a contribution to the
fund, Robert B. Brode, a professor of physics at Berkeley, wrote a
revealing letter to University of Chicago colleague Professor Samuel K.
Alison:
"
I am enclosing a small contribution for your memorial fund for Louis
Slotin. The exact details of how he was killed are not readily
available to those physicists who worked on the engineering end of the
job rather than pure physics. I gathered, however, from the comments
[of others] who have been through here that the whole affair was a
scandal."
I gather from the comments I have heard regarding the Slotin affair
that he himself was guilty of negligence and that the absence of
automatic safeguards was in large measure due to Slotin's insistence
that they were not necessary. I believe that more good would be done
in establishing an award to be given each year to the outstanding
contribution towards safety in handling hazardous radioactive
materials or in recognition of successful accident-free programs. Some
publicity of the outstanding ideas or of the successful research
programs with hazardous materials will certainly help to reduce the
type of accident in which Slotin died."
Follow-up studies suggest that three of the seven survivors of the
Omega Lab accident died years later from complications that might have
been caused by exposure to radiation. While Clifford Honicker maintains
that the U.S. "government response to that tragedy established a
pattern of secrecy that still persists."
According to my 1993 telephone interview with Roger Meade, the
official archivist/historian at the Los Alamos lab: "Everything
during that time period was automatically classified; but as folks ask
for things we get them declassified. For many years the accident
affected people's lives, and nobody was really interested in telling the
story. The physicists tried to put their lives back together. People
think that it's been swept under the rug, but it really hasn't
been." Today, the ultra-modern Los Alamos facility, whose
researchers devote less than "50 per cent" of their time to
weapons work, has some 7,800 employees and spreads out over 43 square
miles. A portion of the original Pajarito Canyon lab where the accident
occurred is still standing.
There is no doubt that Louis Slotin died a hero. While he was waiting
for death in his hospital room at Los Alamos the authorities issued a
special citation which was read to him:
"
Dr. Slotin's quick reaction at the immediate risk of his own life
prevented a more serious development of the experiment which would
certainly have resulted in the death of the seven men working with
him, as well as serious injury to others in the general vicinity."
He had that to think about as the darkness closed in.
Martin Zeilig is a Winnipeg freelance writer.
Fire from the Sun
Not only will atomic power be released, but someday we will harness
the rise and fall of the tides and imprison the rays of the sun.
- Thomas A. Edison, 1921.
In some crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement
can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin and this is a
knowledge which they cannot lose.
- J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1947.
It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the
universe.
- Harry S. Truman, 1945.
Since the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima the atom has become a
spectre threatening us with annihilation.
- Max Born, 1957.
Back to Directory