I think even at that time not everyone would agree and would have actually called him an idiot... "Enrico Fermi himself had warned Slotin that he would be “dea

I think even at that time not everyone would agree and would have actually called him an idiot... "Enrico Fermi himself had warned Slotin that he would be “dead within a year” if he continued—but the exigencies of the Second World War had privileged expediency over safety. " It was irresponsible and kind of reckless.. especially after a similar thing had happened: "Nine months to the day before Slotin’s accident, Daghlian had been working with the very same plutonium core, performing a different criticality experiment that used tungsten-carbide blocks instead of the beryllium tamper.* He dropped one of the blocks, and the core briefly went critical. Daghlian took nearly a month to die." My standard human behavior might have been proactively that of the guard: "But when the core started to glow and people started yelling, he promptly ran out the door and up a nearby hill. " :D ( https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/demon-core-the-strange-death-of-louis-slotin https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/demon-co... )