1948 reconstruction of Louis Slotin’s 1946 criticality accident (with physicist Chris Wright posing as Slotin) Last week, after literally months of research and development, my graphic essay ‘The Blue Flash’ was published by BBC Future . Sitting somewhere between web-comic and illustrated essay, I developed the piece after seeing photographs of a reconstruction of Slotin's accident commissioned in 1948 by Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the 'Project Y' bomb develop

Today I have two offerings on the Manhattan Project. The first is my graphic essay, The Blue Flash for BBC Future. The result of many months of research, it's a study of a fatal accident that happened at Los Alamos National Laboratories in May 1946. Louis Slotin was manually demonstrating a test procedure for plutonium cores when something went wrong. The essay draws on ideas about causality, human perception of hazard, and quantum mechanical theory to ask how and why the