Word: plutonium
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...project and saved Lawrence from great embarrassment. But the postwar years brought another. Putting his prestige and influence in Washington to work, Lawrence overcame the objections of other scientists and won approval for the construction of a monstrous proton accelerator for converting nonfissionable uranium 238 into fission able plutonium, which could be used in nuclear weapons. This time, after three years and huge expenditures, Lawrence completed the accelerator. But to his chagrin, it produced an effective beam of protons for only two hours, then burned out and never could be used again...
...there was Louis Slotin, a morose Canadian with an apparent death wish, who conducted tests of critical assemblies by poking curved segments of uranium or plutonium together with a screwdriver while eying his Geiger counter and neutron monitor. One day in 1946, nudging segments of a Bikini test bomb a little too close, he suddenly saw a blue ionization glow in the room-the sign of a dangerously radioactive reaction. He threw his body over the segments until everyone else in the room could hurry out. Although the others lived, Slotin achieved his death wish. He died in agony nine...
...nuclear force de frappe; when his military DC-6 crashed on takeoff from the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, killing 19 aboard, including his wife and daughter. Placed in charge of developing a French Abomb, Ailleret orchestrated the project that succeeded in detonating a low-yield plutonium device in the Sahara in 1960; as Chief of Staff, he planned the "all azimuths" strategy, in which France seeks the ability to deliver nuclear weapons to any point on earth...
...determine if any of the plutonium-uranium 235 trigger or contaminated wreckage melted into-or even through-the 9-ft.-thick ice in the fire that followed the crash, technicians have taken ice-core samples that will be an alyzed for radioactivity in U.S. and Danish labs. If it is determined that any substantial amount of hot debris penetrated the ice and sank to the bottom of Baffin Bay, 800 ft. below, deep-diving submersibles (TIME, Jan. 19) may be called in to recover it, just as they were in the Palomares crash...
Thus far, the H-bomb's fail-safe systems have not been foiled even by shattering falls from high altitudes, as happened at Palomares. In that accident, two hydrogen bombs split open on impact and spilled plutonium, dusting nearby farms, which had to be tediously decontaminated. The same kind of low-level alpha radiation, officially described as "negligible," was discovered on the icebound bay off northwestern Greenland last week. The U.S. airmen who detected the radioactivity reached the blackened, 500-yd.-long crash site on Eskimo dog sleds, the only means available in the swirling snow and 50-m.p.h...