If you want to look at it with 21st century eyes, sure. Things were VERY different back then though. What you would call prudent and common sense safety measures, they would have called something that you would think they should be fired for saying. And the boss would have sided with them.
The assembly that killed Slotin was supposed to be used with safety spacers to avoid this specific accident type. He would have been alive if he used them. Fermi infamously warned the physicists, including Slotin, that they will be dead within a year.
What evidence do you have for this? There seems to be a lot of romanticism for an imagined can do spirit, and either people died, as they did in this case, or people understood risks and took action to mitigate them.
> Safety guidance on the day was, he recalls, scarce: personnel were advised to wear a hat and make sure their sleeves were rolled down. The men were then ordered to “sit down with your back towards the blast area and cover your eyes.”
> Despite assurances given at the time that the tests posed little risk to health (via radiation exposure), a significant number of veterans went on to experience significant repercussions.
> Because of its importance in the war, the Trinity test was conducted in secret. Little was known about the dangers of radiation exposure in the 1940s, so local residents were not warned or evacuated in advance of—or even following—the test. As a result, people in surrounding areas were exposed to radiation by breathing contaminated air, eating contaminated foods, and drinking affected water and milk. Some ranches were located within 15 miles of ground zero, and commercial crops were grown nearby.
The stories about these are not romanticised. They’re conveying our ignorance. There is nothing romantic about people dying from radiation.
Oh the immediate parent to me seemed to suggest something like this was all a good thing, but thank you for driving the point home that it was a bad thing, even at the time.
