Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham

Harry K. Daghlian Jr., a twenty-four-year-old physicist on the Manhattan Project, was conducting an after-hours experiment in Los Alamos, New Mexico, when his hand slipped. The test assembly he had built—a ball of plutonium surrounded by tungsten carbide bricks—went critical. Daghlian saw a momentary blue flash and was struck by a wave of gamma and neutron radiation amounting to more than 500 rem. He quickly disassembled the experiment, walked away, and admitted himself to medical care without visible symptoms. But radiation had killed him as surely as if he’d stepped in front of an oncoming train. Twenty-five days later, Daghlian slipped into a coma from which he never awoke—the first person in history to die accidentally from close exposure to nuclear fission.