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Sciences / Humans / Humanities: Dexter Masters' the Accident And Journal of Literature and Science Volume 10, No. 2 (2017) ISSN 1754-646XJournal of Literature and Science 10 (2017) Cordle, “Sciences / Humans / Humanities”: 74-87 Cordle, “Sciences / Humans / Humanities”: 74-87 Sciences / Humans / Humanities: Dexter Masters’ The Accident and Being in the Nuclear Age Daniel Cordle On 21 May, 1946, the Canadian physicist, Louis Slotin, was performing a criticality experiment at Los Alamos, New Mexico, the town that had been built to build the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the year before. Preparations were underway for the Operation Crossroads atomic tests in the South Pacific and the plutonium core with which he was working was intended for detonation at Bikini Atoll.1 The experiment, so perilous it was described as “tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon” by Richard Feynman (Lustig and Shepherd-Barr, 553), involved bringing the core to the point of criticality by gradually enclosing it in two halves of a beryllium shell. As the two halves of the shell were brought together, the beryllium reflected more and more neutrons back into the core, bringing it progressively closer to a self- sustaining chain reaction. Extraordinarily, all that prevented the shell from closing was a screwdriver, used by Slotin to hold up the top half of the shell. As it was gradually lowered, a Geiger counter gave an aural indication of increasing radioactivity. Slotin had performed the experiment numerous times before, but this time his screwdriver slipped and, although he immediately knocked the top half of the shell away, he received a lethal dose of radiation and died nine days later. Seven other scientists, also in the room with Slotin, received radiation doses from the accident, although Slotin’s swift actions, in breaking the apparatus, are often credited with saving their lives. Slotin’s gruesome death, early in the nuclear age – or, more precisely, the coding of that death in narrative – is revealing of concerns that have dominated the nuclear imaginary. The incident provides a telling example of the ways in which scientific knowledge, raw and processed materials and technological artefacts trouble our sense of self as we become nuclear. As a nuclear physicist killed by radioactivity, Slotin’s nuclear becoming is clear to see, but there is a more widespread nuclear becoming after 1945 for which his death comes to stand symbolically (partly through the dissemination of radionuclides from atmospheric weapons testing, which enter ecosystems around the world, but perhaps more crucially through a psychological and cultural adjustment to living in a nuclear age). Slotin’s death has proven fascinating to writers. Probably the most sophisticated representation, on which I will focus in this article, is Dexter Masters’ novel, The Accident (1955; reissued in a new edition in 1985 to coincide with the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing), but versions of the experiment and the accident also feature in the novels Command the Morning (1959) by Pearl Buck, Stallion Gate (1986) by Martin Cruz Smith, Los Alamos (1997) by Joseph Kanon, The Gadget (2001) by Paul Zindels and Changing Light (2007) by Nora Gallagher. These cover a range of genres from the thriller, through young adult fiction, to literary fiction. The event also features in the film, Fat Man and Little Boy (USA, Roland Joffé, 1989), and is the subject of a play, Louis Slotin Sonata (1999), by Paul Mullin and a poetry sequence, Bloom (2010), by Michael Lista. 74 © Format and design JLS 2017 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/> Journal of Literature and Science 10 (2017) Cordle, “Sciences / Humans / Humanities”: 74-87 Of course, radioactivity lab accidents, and variations thereof, have also been assimilated more broadly into popular, particularly comic book and film, culture. From the bite of an irradiated arachnid that turns Peter Parker into Spiderman at a public lecture on “Experiments in Radio-Activity” in the 15 August, 1962 edition of Amazing Fantasy (2-3), to the lab accident that transforms Jonathan Osterman into Dr Manhattan in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ complex alternative history, Watchmen (chap. 4, 7-8), the radiation accident has been imagined as the source of dramatic transformation from the wondrous to the sinister. The cultural significance of the accident is rooted in the geopolitical symbolism of its geographical and temporal location (Los Alamos, the heart of the emerging nuclear state, on the cusp between the Second World and Cold Wars) and the quintessentially nuclear qualities of Slotin’s death. It also provides an opportunity to reflect, in the context of this special edition of JLS, on the value of the ScienceHumanities and the Nuclear Humanities. The stress on the “Humanities” in this new terminology is instructive.2 As well as describing an interest in the cultural and social dimensions of the sciences, it signals a preoccupation with the ramifications of the human experience of science. It is, indeed, precisely the question of being human in the nuclear age that is the subject of The Accident. We might understand the nuclear age as one dimension of the risk society described by the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens in which, as Giddens puts it, “we increasingly live on a high technological frontier which absolutely no one completely understands and which generates a diversity of possible futures” (Giddens, 3).3 The human relation to the world, and the experience of being human, is different in such an age. It is not that the risk society is necessarily more dangerous than previous societies (though it may well be that), but that we have entered an era of technological modernity transformed by the “end of nature” (when almost all aspects of the natural world are touched by a human presence) and the “end of tradition” (the relinquishing of the belief that what happens to humans is simply fated by external forces). This is an age of “manufactured risk” which is “created by the very progression of human development, especially by the progression of science and technology” (Giddens, 4). Hence, the contemporary understanding of risk is born with Modernity and is “bound up with the aspiration to control and particularly with the idea of controlling the future” (Giddens, 3). The Accident’s focus on the nature of accident, on control and the loss of control, and on the alternative futures unleashed by the nuclear moment, make it a text preoccupied with risk in the sense described by Giddens. Moreover, these uncertain and proliferating futures continue to haunt the contemporary imagination. Continuing controversy about nuclear technologies (civilian and military), anxieties about the safe storage of nuclear waste tens of thousands of years into the future and, perhaps most of all, the re-emergence of the rhetoric of nuclear nationalism in a context of radical geopolitical uncertainty (most obviously, at the time of writing, in heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula), mean that The Accident remains strikingly resonant in the twenty-first century. Before turning to it, I should say a few words about what approaching science from a literary perspective means. Fundamental questions for the ScienceHumanities are about how different kinds of expertise are constructed, how they function and what limitations there are upon them. These questions were at the heart of the “science wars” of the 1990s, when disputes about social constructivist approaches to science raged across the Science/Humanities interface. Harry Collins’ work on the sociology of science is well worth reading in this regard for its balanced discussion of 75 © Format and design JLS 2017 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/> Journal of Literature and Science 10 (2017) Cordle, “Sciences / Humans / Humanities”: 74-87 the ways in which scientific expertise is socially constructed (both from within and from outside science) and for its acknowledgement that, despite this, science should, as he says with his co-author Robert Evans in Rethinking Expertise, “be treated not just as a resource, but as a central element of our culture” (Collins and Evans, 11). Literary studies may seem to have an even more precarious claim to legitimacy than sociology in its engagement with science. Yet, as long as it is clear what claims it is making, there is a strong case for seeing it as having an important role to play in the ScienceHumanities. In an earlier work I argued for the value, in literature-science studies, of distinguishing between “professional science,” that set of practices, languages and expertise comprising the life of the working scientist, frequently not directly accessible to Humanities scholars without specialist training, and “cultural science,” the presence in the world of translations and mistranslations of professional science, as well as a body of artefacts and technologies with which they are associated (Cordle, 51-53).4 With Slotin’s death and its subsequent translation into narrative we have a case in point here of modes of knowing shifting between professional and cultural science. While there is much of the story that might be deemed truly accessible only to those with a scientific training (the processes by which the core went critical; the physiological impact on Slotin’s body of exposure to ionizing radiation), when it enters narrative it becomes culturally potent. Masters’ novel provides a case study of sense-making in an atomic age: the cultural processing of nuclear knowledge, experience and artefacts into meaning. In its retelling, Slotin’s death troubles our idea of risk; it troubles too our idea of the human. Dexter Masters’ The Accident Masters’ novel is an interesting hybrid of fiction and history. It follows events between the accident and the death that follows it several days later, correlates directly in various ways with what happens to Slotin, but introduces enough overt differences to give Masters the artistic freedom to explore an emerging nuclear consciousness in the mid-1940s.
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