Doctor Curmudgeon® “Tickling the Dragon’s Tail”: A Closer Look at Doctor Louis Slotin
By Diane Batshaw Eisman, M.D. FAAP Doctor Eisman is in Family Practice in Aventura, Florida with her partner, Dr. Eugene Eisman, an internist/cardiologist
On a rainy day, many, many years ago, boredom pushed me upstairs to our attic. Near the door was a box with a pile of ancient magazines. For some reason, one of them caught my eye, and so I sat down and looked through it.
And in this old magazine, one story has stayed with me. It was the first time I heard the phrase “Tickling the Dragon’s Tail.”
The story told of Dr. Louis Slotin, a physicist who had performed this dangerous technique.
Dr. Slotin worked at Los Alamos in the good old days when some physicists were riskily using screwdrivers to bring pieces of fissile material nearly to criticality (and thus creating a critical mass – the minimum amount needed for an atomic chain reaction to occur).
It was this screwdriver technique that was known as “tickling the dragon’s tail.” And so aptly named.
Slotin had done the experiment many times, and he was well aware of how dangerous this method was.
He would, very carefully of course, “tickle the dragon’s tail.” With one hand, he would wedge his thumb into a hole in a hollow Beryllium hemisphere while his other hand actually gripped a screwdriver!
Just a plain old screwdriver. At the Los Alamos Scientific laboratory in New Mexico.
This was the core of a nuclear weapon. In one Beryllium hemisphere, there resided a bit of plutonium which stuck its nose out of the center. Louis Slotin was well known as a world expert in the handling of Plutonium.
The Beryllium spheres were kept apart by two one-inch spacers. In this technique of critical assembly, the spacers would be removed so that one edge of the upper shell rested on the lower shell and Slotin’s screwdriver supported the other edge of the upper shell. While Slotin painstakingly and with great delicacy lowered his screwdriver to bring the halves closer, a Geiger counter recorded the radioactivity.
But something happened.
There were reports that another scientist in the room accidentally brushed against Slotin.
But for whatever reason, this horribly dangerous experiment became deadly.
The screwdriver slipped.
The hemispheres met. This joining of the two hemispheres was the worst possible outcome.
The upper shell was now completely over the core.
A blue flash occurred, lasting less than one second.
But the physicists in the room knew what had happened.
Dr. Slotin had received a dose of radiation that was lethal.
Dr. Michio Kaku, another atomic scientist said, “Slotin lunged forward and grabbed the two hemispheres with his bare hands ripped them apart and took the full brunt of a nuclear detonation right in his stomach”
It was May 21, 1946 and Dr. Louis Slotin knew that he was now a dead man. A dose of five hundred rem is considered fatal to a human being. Slotin was hit with a dose of about twenty one hundred rems (A rem is a unit of radiation and abbreviated from Roentgen Equivalent Man and it is defined as the dosage that can cause the same amount of injury to a human as one Roentgen of an X ray).
Dr. Enrico Fermi had warned Slotin that he would d be “dead within a year,” if he continued.
Alex Wellerstein wrote in The New Yorker, “He died nine days after the accident, at the age of thirty five. The cause was recorded as acute radiation syndrome, known as radiation sickness. His body was shipped to Winnipeg for burial in a sealed Army casket.”
And “tickling the dragon’s tail” stopped. The plutonium core that killed Dr. Louis Slotin, known as the Demon Core, was melted down and sent to a nuclear stockpile in the summer of 1946.
Dr. Curmudgeon suggests “Bitter Medicine”, Dr. Eugene Eisman’s story of his experiences–from the humorous to the intense—as a young army doctor serving in the Vietnam War.
Bitter Medicine by Eugene H. Eisman, M.D. –on Amazon
Doctor Curmudgeon® is Diane Batshaw Eisman, M.D., a physician-satirist. This column originally appeared on SERMO, the leading global social network for doctors.
SERMO www.sermo.com
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