The phrase Louis Slotin used after he caused the accident was reportedly "Well, that does it." Haunting. He knew exactly what was going to happen to him.
The crazy thing is, it was only him who died of radiation poisoning. There were eight people in the room: four physicists, a student, a photographer, an engineer, and a security guard, ranging in age from 21 to 54. Only Slotin was killed when the Demon Core went supercritical.
They're all dead today, of course; it happened in 1946. But while Slotin died nine days after the accident, the only other person who died within the next decade was the security guard: 21-year-old Patrick Joseph Cleary, who died four years later at age 25. But it wasn't plutonium that killed him, it was lead--as far as I can tell in the Battle of the Pusan Perimeter, shortly after the US entered the Korean War.
The others died-
- 19 years later, from a skiing accident (age 55)
- 55 years later, of natural causes (age 81)
- 19 years later, of leukemia (age 42)
- 29 years later, of a bacterial infection in his heart (age 83)
- 52 years later, of natural causes (age 88)
- 42 years later, of unknown causes (age 65)
Just remarkable that such an unbelievable amount of radiation could be emitted that one person would die almost immediately, but that everyone else would live long enough to be killed by war, accidents, sickness, or even natural causes.
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