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Norris Bradbury, group leader for bomb assembly, stands next to the partially assembled Gadget atop the test tower at Los Alamos in 1945.
Building the bomb, tickling the dragon
“Tickling the dragon’s tail.” That’s how the small group of physicists working at Los Alamos in the 1940s under the watch of Robert Oppenheimer described the dangerous job of assembling a nuclear core for the first atomic bomb. One wrong move and a chain nuclear reaction — the dragon — could have wiped them all out.
Even though the Manhattan Project was America’s most sensitive and secretive task — and the focus of the new Christopher Nolan film that opens tomorrow — Canada and the UK also contributed to the work. And at the very heart of it was a Jewish Canadian scientist named Louis Slotin, who emerged as the bomb assembler-in-chief. He worked with the radioactive material to build the core of the bomb — literally tickling the dragon by hand — a skill that led to his fame, but also to his gruesome, slow death by radiation poisoning in 1946.
Slotin was one of about 35 Canadian scientists working at Los Alamos. But Canada’s most crucial contribution — outside the academic work done in places like the famed Montreal Lab – was likely the Eldorado Mine on Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories, which supplied uranium to the bomb project. Canada’s uranium was hauled down from the north and refined in a lovely little Lake Ontario town between Ottawa and Toronto called Port Hope, before being shipped to Los Alamos to be used in Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs that were eventually dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The US-Canada link was so strong that by 1944 the first nuclear reactor outside of the United States was built in Canada in a place called Chalk River, not far from Ottawa — which leads to another fascinating thread … In 1952, there was a nuclear meltdown at the Chalk River plant, and a 28-year-old American naval officer with expertise in nuclear power named Jimmy Carter — yes, the man who would go on to become the 39th US president — rushed in and prevented the accident from becoming catastrophic.
Still, as the new film “Oppenheimer” examines, developing the bomb remains a moral morass, one which Oppenheimer and Slotin openly struggled with. Were they, as Oppenheimer later claimed to have said, the destroyers of worlds, or did they save lives? That moral debate continues.
As nuclear fears reemerge with the war in Ukraine and the NATO alliance is reanimated in its purpose, it’s worth examining again how the world should handle its nuclear capabilities. While Oppenheimer’s later life was subsumed by political suspicion that he was a Communist (there is no evidence he gave the Russians any secrets), Slotin never lived to see that. In 1946, while working at Los Alamos, he was tickling the dragon’s tail by hand when there was an accident, and he was fatally irradiated. He cooked from the inside and slowly, painfully, melted down. His life is a stark reminder that the nuclear dragon is still very much alive, and as we covered recently on our GZERO World PBS program when Ian Bremmer interviewed the International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi, the dragon remains very, very difficult to tame.
Nuclear nonproliferation has worked so far, but watch out for those questioning it — arms control expert
Nuclear nonproliferation treaties have been a success at stopping the atomic club from growing further by discouraging new membership, but nuclear weapons expert Kelsey Davenport says the slow pace of disarmament "is causing some states to begin to question that bargain." Although it's unlikely that nuke-curious countries will actually get the bomb because it costs too much time, money and resources, Davenport told Ian Bremmer on GZERO World that she believes that simply questioning the benefits of nonproliferation creates a real risk that must be "monitored and mitigated."
Watch the episode: Nuclear weapons: more dangerous than ever?
Nuclear weapons: more dangerous than ever?
In recent years, as nuclear disarmament worldwide has slowed to a crawl, world powers are engaging in a new kind of arms race: a technological one. Today's nuclear threat is not about who has the most nukes, it's about who has the smartest ones. Arms control expert Kelsey Davenport joins Ian Bremmer on GZERO World to talk about the world's long fascination with these horrible weapons and how close we still remain to all-out nuclear war.
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The new nuclear arms race: Smarter, faster nukes
There's a lot of talk about nukes these days — but not about Cold War-era massive arsenals and mutually assured destruction. Nuclear weapons expert Kelsey Davenport says the risk of something going horribly wrong is rising because countries like China or Russia are developing smaller warheads and high-tech delivery systems such as hypersonic missiles, which traditional arms control agreements don't take into account. "We have to be more creative than thinking just about the numbers," she explains, adding that what's more destabilizing is countries investing in nukes that are so nimble and travel so fast they can penetrate US defense systems. Watch her interview with Ian Bremmer on the upcoming episode of GZERO World on US public television - check local listings.
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