Louis slotin movie

Tickling the Dragon's Tail

By Brad Oswald, Columnist
Winnipeg Free Press, Friday, April 16, 1999

Imagine, if you can, what must go through your mind the moment death arrives.

Then try to imagine realizing you're dead, but having to wait nine more days for the end to actually arrive.

That is, for all intents and purposes, the fate that befell Louis Slotin, a brilliant, locally born scientist who played an instrumental role in the development of the first atomic bomb.

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It was May 21, 1946 - mere months after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought an end to the Second World War, and less than a year after a triggering mechanism he built was used to detonate the first test bomb, nicknamed Trinity, in the New Mexico desert - when a laboratory accident exposed Slotin to a lethal dose of radiation.

The mishap might have been even more tragic, but Slotin's decisive, heroic action saved the lives of several other scientists in the laboratory.

The little-known story of