The Rift

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On August 21, 1945, Harry K. Daghlian was stacking blocks just fifteen days after the bomb they’d put together at Los Alamos blew the dragon’s breath onto Hiroshima and twelve days after Nagasaki received the same fate.

Enrico Fermi called what Daghlian was doing “tickling the dragon’s tail.”

He had no idea how right he was.

On this day, Daghlian dropped a block.

Everyone has dropped something. Sometimes one hits the big toe and hops about and curses. Sometimes the thing dropped breaks. Unfortunately, the blocks Daghlian was stacking and what he was stacking them around were both rather unusual.

Rarely does the thing dropped kill, but when connected to the dragon, nothing good can happen. Daghlian was part of the Critical Assembly Group and was attempting to build a neutron reflector by arranging bricks of tungsten carbide around a plutonium core, trying to achieve criticality.

He was moving the last brick into place — sort of like how one should never do the last run on the ski slope, except a lot more dangerous — when the neutron counters in the room went off, alerting him that the last brick would be a mistake. What physicists call going supercritical and laymen call a “big oops.”

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