Power Corrupts Absolutely No One

The Demon Core was a three-and-a-half inch sphere of plutonium-gallium, plated with a coat of nickel. As a mass of metal, it would appear inert (if very dense and heavy) — but the shiny sphere had a secret. It was engineered to be hovering a hair’s breadth away from going supercritical: prompting a runaway fission chain-reaction and emitting a burst of high-energy radioactivity.

The year was 1945. Another plutonium sphere, twin to the Demon Core, had just demonstrated one way to bring the metal to supercriticality: by compressing the fissile material of the sphere. The source of the compression force? A shell of shaped conventional explosive charge. The location? 1,600 feet above a tennis court in the northwest quadrant of Nagasaki city.

That chain-reaction was intended to build on itself and lead to a massive release of energy — an awful explosion that would demonstrate not only to the Japanese Emperor but also to the advancing Russian Army the cruel power of the industrial West. It was meant to terrify and to cause a psychic wound.

Yet it was the Demon Core that taught the U.S. a lesson in hubris — not once, but twice.

In late August of 1945 (a couple weeks after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), 24-year-old physicist Harry Daghlian was experimenting with a second way of making the core go supercritical: surrounding the plutonium sphere with materials that would reflect neutrons back into the chain-reaction. Astonishingly, Daghlian was solo at the work bench, stacking reflective bricks by hand around the plutonium core, during an unapproved late-night trial on August 21. Only a security guard was with him in the room. There was absolutely no room for error. Should a brick land out of place and drive the core to a prompt-critical state, 100,000,000,000,000,000 (one hundred thousand trillion) fissions would occur in less than one second.

As Daghlian approached the assembly with one more brick, a sensor warned him that he had brought the core to the very utmost brink of destabilization. Daghlian paused, and then moved his arm to withdraw the tungsten-carbide brick. His fingers fumbled the brick, and it dropped onto the stack. Daghlian immediately lunged to fling the brick from the table…but it was too late.

Daghlian instantly received approximately 5.1 Sieverts of radiation, a lethal dose of poisoning that took his life 25 days later. (The security guard, Pvt. Robert Hemmerly, died 33 years later of leukemia caused by the radiation. He had been approximately 12 feet from the core when the flash of blue light shot out across the room and bathed him in its lethal rays.

But the lesson was not learned. A mere nine months later, in May of 1946, another young physicist, Louis Slotkin, was training his replacement bomb core assembler on yet another criticality experiment with the Demon Core. This time, two hemispheric shells of beryllium metal were used to reflect neutrons back into the chain-reaction. Instead of holding the beryllium shells apart with the proper shims, Slotkin used a flathead screwdriver turned on its edge, carefully twisting the handle by hand to raise and lower the upper shell.

As a room full of bystanders watched in horror, Slotkin lost control of the screwdriver, and the beryllium shells closed together, reflecting the neutrons into the fission reaction. By the time Slotkin could use the screwdriver to flip the top shell off the core, he had already received more radiation than any living person had ever been exposed to; Slotkin knew he was going to die.

Several men had run from the room, but were called back to their positions, so their radiation exposures could be calculated by Slotkin. He determined that several of them had received enough radiation to impact their life expectancy but not kill them right away. Slotkin, himself, died just nine days later. He was just 35.

It’s easy to hear in these stories of disaster at the hands of young military physicists in their 20s and 30s a version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice — and think it a tale of arrogance in the face of the unknown, a presumption of mastery where there is too little experience and wisdom. Yet, that is a misreading of the circumstances.

Slotkin and Daghlian knew exactly what they were doing. They knew the tremendous risk of a terrible mistake. Just weeks prior, they had seen their handiwork obliterate two cities and hundreds of thousands of people. Moreover, consider this: 1945 was a mere fifty years after the discovery of radioactivity, and only three years after the first sustained nuclear chain reaction was accomplished in a converted racquetball court at the University of Chicago.

No one really knew more than Slotkin and Daghlian about what was at stake. They handled the spheres of Plutonium, an elemental metal that is so rarely occurring in nature that some isotopes only form in supernova explosions of dying stars. Alpha and Gamma radiation is invisible to the eyes, being far beyond the optical range on the electromagnetic spectrum. These men were magicians, calculating sub-atomic dynamics and wielding blocks of heavy metals that are chemically toxic to living organisms in order to direct flows of radiant energy that can be felt only indirectly. They were perhaps as close to material alchemists as anyone ever has been.

So, why were they so cocky?

Part of the answer (as we’ve discussed elsewhere) may be that they were compelled by the Appel du Vide. Working intimately with such extreme danger can engender an alluring siren song to become one with that danger — to merge with it.

The other (related) reason is that they had been given enormous discretionary power. Pvt. Hemmerly didn’t forbid Daghlian from performing his late-night solo experiment even though he probably knew it was against procedural policy. At the heart of the experience of wielding power is a hypnotic dream of control. Contrary to what it might seem, these young men didn’t simply imagine themselves possessing a degree of control that escaped them. It’s quite possible that they hypnotized themselves into a deadly alignment of purpose with the Demon Core.

A theorem for you: all power is the power suggestion. To suggest means to “bring from below,” that is, to materialize and shape into being an idea or command from the mysterious dynamics of the subconscious world where so much of reality resides. You suggest, you name, you identify, you interpret, and you contextualize everything that exists in your perception — and it is in this rather dreamy state of dredging the subconscious to identify and bring forth recognizable objects that you exert all power.

Always, the first person you have power over, then, is yourself…in the sense that you weave the spell first over yourself. Your cognition is comprised every second from a mixture of your sensory input and your dreaming imagination.

And the power of suggestive language, as any halfway skillful hypnotist will tell you, plays an enormous role in how you experience reality. After all, you’re not asleep when you’re In a hypnotic state (despite the name) — you’re in a highly suggestible altered state where the evocative power of words has superseded other sensory input and thought processes to guide your experience. But even when we haven’t submitted entirely to the spell, words are always shaping the contours of our expectations, and other context clues are weaving the fabric of what we perceive to be happening.

In essence, this is power; the ability to cast a contextual spell is what makes some people become social masters of their universe, get things done, inspire others, put audiences at ease or have them on the edge of their seats. People will give all their money, make very consequential choices, even give up their lives and freedom for the right spell.

And, again: we have the ability to enchant ourselves, and we always start there. (This is why the title — because “power” cannot corrupt the person (or the idea of the “person”) that was generated from the first by that powerful spell.) Some very curious results ensue from opening this door in human consciousness, which we all do in the course of our toddlerhoods.

A popular empowerment workshop in this country offers up the following thought-experiment: when you first step onto a tennis court and receive a serve, you are likely to hardly even see the ball before it streaks past you. The difference for a tennis pro is that the pro can see the ball as if in slow-motion, each incremental moment of its arc; and the pro has time and space and dexterity in abundance to respond to the incoming target.

Through repetition and immersion in an experience, we can hypnotize ourselves so that we experience reality very differently, a dilated version that is a cataract of possibilities. This is how, for instance, an artist can create an incredibly detailed portrait, or a musician enter a piece of music with subtlety and awareness that is only poorly summarized by the word skill from the outside.

One of the oddest experiences a person can witness in themselves is the arising of an expanded state of awareness and ability that comes from a hitherto unknown aspect of oneself — from the mystery within. It is, of course, from these hidden reservoirs of evocative dreams and visions, desires and epiphanies of awareness that power comes to guide and compel others, control others; for there is a contest of dreams, in a way, with the most evocative gathering and entraining other minds and lives to them. This process happens fluidly, and power is not usually held very long by any one party in the free, natural flow of control.

And so, we return to the heart of the matter, with the shimmering, transient, otherworldly graceful state of control arising from the mysterious and expanded state of awareness in our hypnotic experience of reality. That marvelous poise comes with its own agenda, so to speak. There are circumstances and events we must participate in — we need to participate in — that are beyond our intentional design, yet for which we must prepared with powerful awareness and capability. This can range from the brute force needed to lift a car off a body in an emergency to the finesse of saying exactly the necessary thing at the right moment. It can be a word of command to stop danger in its tracks, or a bold action which sets a cascade of outcomes in motion. In other words, power can be subtle or dramatic, covert or overt, but it flows from controlled congruency with expanded reality.

What would possess Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotkin to be so wildly cavalier with the most dangerous substance on the planet at that moment? Is it conceivable that two physicists who knew better than almost anyone alive precisely how immense and instantaneous would be the magnitude of their mistakes if they strayed by the slimmest of margins from their almost-ritualized task would actually be…careless? Hot-dogging it with Plutonium, of all things?

The circumstantial evidence suggests otherwise. In Daghlian’s case, his own notes indicate that he had intended to let the matter rest, after a morning and afternoon spent exploring the various setups to bring the core to the brink of criticality; yet, mysteriously, he changed his mind and returned to the lab the night — against protocol — to run one more setup sequence. It was as if Daghlian were compelled to return by magic spell. And Slotkin, he had the shims available, but he didn’t use them. It just doesn’t bear plausibility that Slotkin would be willing to take such an extraordinary risk with the screwdriver unless he imagined he had somehow, himself, become part of the experiment.

This is the crux of the matter. Both of these men behaved as though they had been absorbed into magic in which they were fluent, in which the wide universe of possibilities had opened before their eyes — and in which they were mere servants to a deeper, more subliminal design.

We do not control Power. Rather, Power controls us. The expanded reality it yields never lets go of us; we are in its thrall.

It is even possible that Slotkin and Daghlian wanted to see the unbridled chain-reaction release its enormous power just once, leap off the page and reveal the mighty god behind the extraordinary relationship E=MC². After all, only those who approached the speed of light or entered the vicinity of an exotic object like a black-hole would ever get to witness the awesome and terrifying grace of that simple equation — and that speed and those places are the province of angels, not hominids.

They couldn’t directly witness Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was war, it was secret, it was, in the end, a sharpened spear: intended to kill or maim those who crossed paths with it. But, some part of them (never, ever to speak out loud, certainly) knew that they were within a fraction of an inch of unleashing a power that placed in such circumstances of invitation surely wanted to get out, to show itself. Power tends toward revealing.

And, perhaps guilt too played a hand in the spell that mesmerized them. They were the bomb makers. It was too much, maybe, to visit such cosmic forces and enormous power upon other people and not make the pilgrimage, just once, to see it in closeup upon the lab bench.

Even if they had to frame it as an accident.