Today and every day for the next week, we offer readers a sneak peek at the life stories of 12 of the Top 30 Greatest Manitobans ever, as chosen by Winnipeg Free Press readers in a collaborative process that lasted all summer. We've chosen seven profiles at random for you to enjoy, but the last five are that long-awaited countdown to the No. 1 greatest Manitoban ever. Our book The Greatest Manitobans launches in November.
Atom Smasher
North End boy was part of an extraordinary group of trailblazers who changed the course of the 20th century
On July 16, 1945 in the remote New Mexican desert, humankind unleashed its first weapon of mass destruction.
Scientists from the top-secret Manhattan Project watched in awe as their atomic "gadget" detonated at the Trinity test site, igniting the nuclear age.
A brilliant young physicist named Louis Slotin had assembled the very heart of the bomb -- its plutonium core -- and delivered it to a brigadier general. He kept the receipt as a memento.
The dark-haired, bespectacled scientist who worked alongside Robert Oppenheimer and other physics legends was raised in Winnipeg's North End. He was one of an extraordinary group of atom-splitting trailblazers who changed the course of the 20th century.
As a research associate at the University of Chicago, Slotin had been present on Dec. 2, 1942 for the world's first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.
"He etched his name in scientific history," says Winnipeg journalist Martin Zeilig, associate producer of a 1999 documentary about Slotin, Tickling the Dragon's Tail.
Slotin might have gone on after the war to decades of achievement -- maybe even a Nobel prize, suggests his niece, Winnipegger Beth Shore.
But less than a year after hand-assembling the Trinity bomb core, he was dead at the age of 35.
The controversial accident that claimed his life has overshadowed his accomplishments. The tragic slip-up has been recounted -- and embellished -- in movies, plays, a novel called The Accident, historical books and countless articles. It has mushroomed into a nuclear-age myth that casts Slotin as the martyred saviour of seven lives.
In spring 1946, Slotin had been working at the secret bomb-building compound of Los Alamos, N.M. for about 18 months. The war was over and he was anxious to get back to the University of Chicago for the fall term. But first, he had agreed to go to Bikini Atoll for Navy tests of atomic bombs.
Not much is known about the bachelor physicist's moral perspective on the bomb, though he told his father, "We had to get it before the Germans."
He had not gone overseas the year before to assemble the A-bombs that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki because his U.S. citizenship was not finalized.
Still, there is evidence that he was troubled. Two months before his death, Slotin wrote: "I have become involved in the Navy tests, much to my disgust... I am one of the few people left here who are experienced bomb putter-togetherers."
On May 21, 1946, Slotin was asked to demonstrate a dangerous experiment known as "tickling the dragon's tail."
Ironically, "this would have been his last time doing the experiment," notes Zeilig, who wrote an exhaustive article about Slotin for The Beaver magazine in 1995.
Slotin had done the table-top procedure dozens of times, to test the reactivity of a bomb core. It involved gradually lowering one hemisphere of beryllium-coated plutonium onto another.
He had to bring them close enough to start a fission reaction without allowing them to touch and awaken the dragon's wrath.
With his right hand, Slotin was using a screwdriver to hold the hemispheres wedged apart. His left hand grasped the upper hemisphere. A Geiger counter clicked faster and an instrument graphed the reaction rate in red ink as "criticality" approached.
It seems incredible today that anyone would perform a nuclear test with a screwdriver. But the intense Slotin had been taking such extraordinary risks since his days in Chicago.
He had a reputation as "a bit of a cowboy," says his nephew, Winnipegger Israel Ludwig.
The culture at Los Alamos was one of improvisation, habitual urgency and hands-on bravado.
"They cut corners," says Ludwig.
And Slotin may well have been recruited for the Manhattan Project because of his nervy attitude.
"It took a little bit of a daredevil to actually get what he was doing done," says Dwight Vincent, head of the University of Winnipeg physics department.
At 3:20 p.m. on that fateful day, with seven colleagues present in the lab, Slotin's screwdriver apparently slipped. The two halves touched and "went critical" with a blue glow and a burst of heat.
The "bomb putter-togetherer" had given himself a fatal dose of radiation. Since he was standing nearest to the apparatus, he absorbed most of the impact.
He died nine days later of horrific radiation sickness, blistered and swollen as if he had been standing 1.4 kilometres from a nuclear bomb blast. The other seven men survived, though according to a 1989 story in the New York Times Magazine, at least three of their eventual deaths were linked to the radiation exposure.
Slotin's metamorphosis into a folk hero began with the official statements and condolence letter from the U.S. Army. Releasing almost no details of the highly classified incident, authorities lauded the scientist for his quick dismantling of the experiment, saying it reflected "the highest type of courage."
Journalists -- and perhaps friends and family members -- began to embroider the tale. They reported that Slotin "lunged" or "dived" to rip the hemispheres apart, deliberately putting himself in the path of the deadly rays to save the others.
This scenario, reminiscent of a soldier throwing himself on a grenade, is a noble fiction -- but a persistent one.
Winnipeg's only plaque honouring Slotin hyperbolically states that he "willingly and heroically laid down his life to save seven fellow scientists" and that he "spontaneously leaped forward, covering the experiment with his body."
First-hand evidence indicates the less romantic reality: Slotin simply reflexively shifted his left hand and dropped the upper hemisphere to the floor.
The story's ultimate irony is that, according to retired Los Alamos physicist Dick Malenfant and other experts, the fission reaction had halted itself in a fraction of a second -- before Slotin reacted -- due to rapid heating of the plutonium.
So if Slotin didn't save anyone, was he a hero?
Some say it was heroic that he lost his life while doing experimental physics in the climate of haste fostered by the arms race. Others see Slotin's accidental suicide as a fatal case of hubris.
His close friend and fellow physicist Philip Morrison believed Slotin became "overconfident in his own infallibility."
Mysteriously, no account of the botched experiment by Slotin himself has ever surfaced. And there were still classified reports about the Slotin affair that the government-run Los Alamos National Laboratory refused to show Clifford Honicker, author of the 1989 New York Times Magazine story.
The University of Winnipeg's Vincent, a Newfoundlander, wishes more Manitobans knew that one of their own was exceptional enough to reach a "critical position" within the inner circle of the Manhattan Project.
"There's no plaque at the University of Manitoba (where Slotin earned bachelor's and master's degrees)," says Vincent. "There's no building called the Slotin Building. And I think it's mainly because he screwed up."
Slotin's death marked the end of a rugged era when mortals sparred with atomic power as if it were a beast they could slay with a screwdriver. Thereafter, criticality tests were done by remote control.
"It took courage to do what he was doing," says Zeilig. "Certainly, he was a courageous, brilliant, dedicated scientist who gave his life for his work.
"He was a part of us. He was a Winnipegger -- a North End Jewish boy."
alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca
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