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 accident happened. I owe a debt of gratitude to Richard Fisher for commissioning the piece and for his patience while I worked out how on earth I was going to make it happen. (The drawing above is a preparatory study for the essay, of the moments before Slotin's accident, showing the assembly he was using to test the reactivity of a plutonium core - the ball in the middle).
The second is an interview with Dan Snow for his History Hit podcast, about Robert Oppenheimer, whom I also wrote about recently for the BBC. Listen to the interview here:
Thank you to Dan for having me on the show and to James Hickmann, the show's producer.
NOTE: I want to apologise to all listeners for my repeated mispronunciation of the name of Prince Arjuna from the Bhagavad Gita (which I say, twice, as 'Ajurna') in the interview. This was also something I got picked up on for misspelling in my BBC article about Oppenheimer. The two are not unrelated. In my defence I can only plead dyslexia. I am practicing saying it correctly quietly to myself, just in case I have to do it again.