Blake says:
August 16, 2013 at 6:08 pm
Disturbingly, this may not have even been Slotin’s first time seeing or touching that enigmatic and beautiful Cherenkov glow. A few months before his fatal misadventure he swam to the bottom of a borated water shielding pool on top of the Clinton pile at ORNL WHILE IT WAS OPERATING to repair one of his experiments that he didn’t want to wait another 2 days until shutdown to fix. He took off his film badge before doing it of course, so it was only roughly estimated later that he likely blasted himself with an obscene ~>100R of exposure. Fermi was bang on in his warning that Slotin’s gross recklessness would soon see him dead.

!!! Hard to excuse Fermi (et al) for not house-breaking this yahoo, given that he might well have taken n-others with him (as almost .. with the Core.) What if he took Oppie with him? in some 'demo'.
And war time risks considered, even: anyone here could cobble-up a gadget that could physically limit the proximity of that perfectly machined Half-a-Hellfire, for any utterly-necessary experiment. Remotely.. would be an obvious first choice too.

I recall seeing a potboiler movie (with Muy, the sci. teacher) The Beginning or the End, which portrayed Slotin as you'd expect: bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young Scientist/dying heroically. Hollywood!

Really the entire Manhattan Project now seems surreal, but then: it sure got this kid to want to learn Moar about how that stuff worked ... now:
if-Only it Hadn't: no cold war, ICBMs, but maybe a Hot one ... but n $Ts as could have bought ... {Sanity?}