[anon84873628]

>juxtaposing something incredibly stressful and dangerous, with something else.

That "something else" to me is the absolute ease of the act. I think we normally expect the scale of the consequences to match the setup difficulty.

Simply bringing two pieces of metal together for instant death? It's absolute magic!

So there's also the wizardry component of it. It tickles our love of fantasy stories and arcane power, and the irresponsible handling thereof.

Elsewhere someone mentions lighting cigarettes at a gas station. That situation has similar aspects, but lacks the magical flair.

[mikewarot]

>Simply bringing two pieces of metal together for instant death? It's absolute magic!

There wasn't anything instant about the death, from Wikipedia:[1]

  Despite intensive medical care and offers from numerous volunteers to donate blood for transfusions, Slotin's condition was incurable.[2] He called his parents and they were flown at Army expense from Winnipeg to be with him. They arrived on the fourth day after the incident, and by the fifth day his condition started to deteriorate rapidly.
  
  Over the next four days, Slotin suffered an "agonizing sequence of radiation-induced traumas", including severe diarrhea, reduced urine output, swollen hands, erythema, "massive blisters on his hands and forearms", intestinal paralysis and gangrene. He had internal radiation burns throughout his body, which one medical expert described as a "three-dimensional sunburn." By the seventh day, he was experiencing periods of "mental confusion." His lips turned blue and he was put in an oxygen tent. He ultimately experienced "a total disintegration of bodily functions" and slipped into a coma. Slotin died at 11 a.m. on 30 May, in the presence of his parents.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Slotin's_death

[fluoridation]

It was instant in that his fate was sealed in an instant. This is unlike basically every other form of death. If you're bleeding out there's a chance you can be patched up and transfused. If a cancer is killing you it could get treated. But Slotin was a dead man walking the moment his hand slipped; there was nothing anyone could do about it.

[anon84873628]

Exactly. I figured my meaning was assumed in the earlier comment.

But the details also adds to the magical element. It's not just being reckless, but being reckless with a horrible, excruciating, protracted, torture curse.

A story of using a screwdriver to fiddle with a loaded gun while the muzzle is pointed at you wouldn't have the same appeal, because the consequence is so much more direct and mundane.

[fluoridation]

It was a form of death that was extremely novel, considering the entire history of humanity. He wrecked his entire body at the molecular level in a way that takes days to fully take effect. Before nuclear research the only ways to kill you comparably were either very violent and immediate, dosing with some chemical aggressor (e.g. venom, fungal toxin), or rabies. Radiation poisoning works at the physical level, like getting punched really hard in every covalent bond in your body. Death by a trillion cuts.

[TeMPOraL]

> or rabies

Rabies is actually a great comparison. It has similar magical/horrifying feel to it. Like with the screwdriver slip-up, catching rabies can look like a total non-event; here, it doesn't kill you yet, merely starts the timer on a bomb. The countdown can be anything between days and years, and when it runs out - when the first symptoms start showing - you're already dead. Then the dying happens, which... relative to radiation sickness, I'm really not sure which is better.

To add an insult to injury, rabies is very much curable before the symptoms show - but you have to realize you may have been exposed in the first place.

[Scarblac]

It also reminds me of the horrible stories that exist on the Internet about people committing suicide by means of a paracetamol overdose (usually with a lot of alcohol as well).

They are found, rushed to the hospital, they wake up and feel better, everybody can meet them and see them alive and know of their attempt -- but they're walking dead, their liver is incurably damaged and they die in a few days.

[snowwrestler]

But actually there are tons of visual jokes about people looking down the barrels of loaded guns, cannon, even lightsabers:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/1hy7fu/never_look...

I didn’t think of it this way before, but yeah, the demon core memes are absolutely cousins of this type of loaded weapon humor.

[fluoridation]

What they said is that it wouldn't have the same appeal, which is true. Someone shooting themselves by looking into the barrel of a gun as a joke is funny because it's a really obviously stupid thing to do. Luke lightsabering himself in the eye is funny first due to shock value, and second as a form of observational humor by pointing out how even though lightsabers are so obviously dangerous, there's not a single mishap where someone maims themselves with their own weapon in the movies.

Someone playing with a screwdriver and a few pieces of various metals is funny because its danger is unintuitive. It's so strange that someone can mishandle such seemingly innocuous objects and then die a few days later because of it, that it's comical. It's a non sequitur.

[thrw42A8N]

Weren't the Jedis actual wizards, and others were forbidden from wielding that weapon exactly because someone would get maimed? The weapon is tech but the reason they don't damage themselves is clearly spelled out magic.

[chuckadams]

Reminds me of "Do not look into laser with remaining eye"

[thaumasiotes]

> This is unlike basically every other form of death.

It's unlike many deaths. But there are plenty more that share that quality.

> Wetterhahn would recall that she had spilled several drops of dimethylmercury from the tip of a pipette onto her latex-gloved hand.

> Approximately three months after the initial accident Wetterhahn began experiencing brief episodes of abdominal discomfort and noticed significant weight loss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn

That onset reminds me of a children's book about postwar Japan, in which a little girl is running around on the playground and falls down. This extremely ordinary event is treated as an emergency, and it turns out to be one.

[glhaynes]

Replace "instant death" with "certain doom" then! Even more fantastical!

[DiggyJohnson]

Of course there was, that’s not even pedantically correct. Death came instantly, only dying took awhile.

[l3x4ur1n]

I mean, if this should happen to me, I want to undergo euthanasia as soon as possible. If I am already dead, I don't want to unnecessarily suffer. So my question is, did he not want the euthanasia or was it not "accepted" or why he had to suffer so much?

[fwip]

The first person the demon core killed, Harry Daghlian, notably allowed the doctors to study and record information about his deterioration due to radiation. I believe Slotin had a similar motivation - that at least, even this slow, painful death could provide valuable information to doctors and scientists.

[rob74]

This was the United States in the mid 1940s, I doubt euthanasia (or even assisted suicide) was much of a thing back then. Plus, as someone else mentioned, there was also the scientifical aspect of being able to study the effects of irradiation.

[hinkley]

You have to admit that the setup of this experiment makes riding a motorcycle, without a helmet, with a .1% BAC, look like more responsible behavior.

The other people in the room got a couple years’ worth of rads from his mistake didn’t they?

I’m sure they rationalized not using an apparatus for this due to embrittlement, thermal expansion, response time, or all three. But from the perspective of someone looking back on this era 50 years later (now 80), Jesus fucking Christ.

Carpenter’s pencils as spacers would have saved his life.

In fact Wikipedia says he was a dumbass:

> The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.

> By Slotin's own unapproved protocol, the shims were not used. The top half of the reflector was resting directly on the bottom half at one point, while 180 degrees from this point a gap was maintained by the blade of a flat-tipped screwdriver in Slotin's hand. The size of the gap between the reflectors was changed by twisting the screwdriver. Slotin, who was given to bravado,[11] became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions,

[jcgrillo]

The real demon here isn't the core it's the flathead screwdriver--lowest among tools. The number of times I've slipped dealing with flathead screws, or stripped them, or nearly had an aneurysm from them is uncountable. No wonder one of these cursed devices played a central role here as well. But yeah he totally could have chucked a couple sticks in there to keep the halves separate and then he wouldn't have died. Oops.

[hinkley]

You can add it to your list of its crimes against humanity: killed at least two nuclear physicists.

[kps]

I'm just surprised it wasn't a Phillips camming out.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Are you sure that's not a JIS screw?

[kps]

This particular core didn't go to Japan.

[disqard]

Transposed to a very different time and place, the "bravado" here really reminded me of the "repeated dives in a carbon-fiber sub to crushing depths" -- with such setups, it's just a matter of when, not if.

[hinkley]

Those people died before they knew they were fucked. At some point acute radiation exposure makes it so they can’t even dose you with morphine properly. Same thing happened at Chernobyl if I recall.

At some point potassium chloride is a mercy.

[jcgrillo]

That's something that seems to be missing from how people perceive the threat of nuclear weapons. It's pleasant and convenient to believe you'll instantaneously combust in a fireball as hot as the sun, but actually only very few people will be so lucky. Mostly it'll take days, weeks, months, and years. Not seconds or fractions of seconds.

[wbl]

This is Soviet propaganda. The real number from Nagasaki and Hiroshima was about half of the casualties were instant. Furthermore fallout is much more understood: after a few short days of hiding inside, the radiation levels will have fallen to where normal life can largely resume without fear, reducing the number of slow casualties.

[jcgrillo]

Do you have any sources to back these claims? Also, what specifically do you mean by "half the casualties were instant"--is it that "of those who died, half of them died instantly" or "of those killed and injured, half of them received their injuries instantly". Or is it some other thing?

I think you're falling into exactly the sort of trap I was talking about, that the enormity of the devastation is so unimaginably great that it's difficult to imagine what it would actually be like, and to (somewhat lazily) conclude "well, it'd probably be instantaneous". But, for example, this analysis doesn't support that idea at all: https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshi...

[cess11]

In Scandinavia we're still sending samples of hunted wild boars to check for cesium. Large parts of Belarus are quite contaminated and the local tyrant is the reason we know very little about how it affects the population in those regions.

[underlipton]

Same with accidents involving nuclear power generators (and their waste). Most people on HN won't have the chance to engage in Slotin's flavor of bravado... But the kind involved in recklessly, breathlessly advocating for nuclear power? Quite common, here.

[sgarland]

I have operated a nuclear reactor. There is nothing in common with this tragic experiment. We have strict procedures that are rigidly followed, and are at all times far, far away from fissile material. We don’t suffer bravado.

[hinkley]

People gave their lives so Chernobyl didn’t destroy every well in Eastern Europe for a thousand years.