A death in the desert that 'Oppenheimer' ignored

Aug. 26—EDITOR'S NOTE — This story was pieced together from a variety of sources, including The Day's archives, documents found online from the Los Alamos Laboratories, articles in national newspapers and magazines, and videos, photos and written histories in the Manhattan Project archives.

New London ― More than 2,000 miles separate New London and Los Alamos, New Mexico, but they are joined by this fact: The first peacetime victim of the atomic age was the 24-year-old Bulkeley School graduate Harry Daghlian, a Manhattan Project nuclear physicist who was exposed in August 1945 to a fatal dose of radiation soon after helping develop the world's first atomic bomb.

Daghlian is not portrayed in the hit "Oppenheimer" film that has people nationwide all abuzz amid box office sales topping $700 million worldwide, though speculation swirled before the movie's release that his story might be part of it. "Oppenheimer" the movie covered a different kind of tragedy, one that occurs when small-minded people grasp for power by trying to destroy the life of a flawed hero.

The story of Haroutune Krikor "Harry" Daghlian Jr., who is buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery and has an unobtrusive (and misspelled) marker at Calkins Park noting his sacrifice, is a much simpler one. He was the first American to die from a nuclear reaction experiment.

Daghlian, the first of three children, was born in 1921 of Armenian American parents in Waterbury but soon moved to New London, and as a boy attended Waller School and then Harbor School, where he first learned to play the violin. A quiet, studious kid with curly dark hair and a round, rosy-cheeked face, he was known to everyone as "Dolly," since the "g" in his name was silent (pronounced Dolly-on).

His father started as an X-ray technician at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital, working his way up eventually to supervisor. His uncle, Garabed K. Daghlian, also lived locally as professor of physics and astronomy at Connecticut College and was quite engaged in civic life, giving frequent lectures on a wide range of topics. The ion accelerator laboratory in the basement of the college's Olin Science Center is named after him.

The young Daghlian became known as a brilliant student, winning prizes at both Harbor School and Bulkeley, where he was the top math scholar. At age 17, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but two years later in 1940 transferred to Purdue University in Indiana, attracted by its particle physics laboratory and the mysterious work its professors were doing there.

Daghlian, third in his class, received his undergraduate degree from Purdue in 1942, and he did so well that he received a postgraduate fellowship that had him teaching physics to students the following semester. By 1943, he was working toward a doctorate in physics.

Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer, quietly assembling a team in Los Alamos to develop the world's first atomic bomb, knew about the lab as well, and in the same year invited Purdue professor Marshall Holloway to give a lecture at Los Alamos while also enlisting him to recruit promising scientists.

Holloway, who had been brought to the Purdue campus at the behest of the Manhattan Project on a secret assignment involving atomic particles, soon transferred to Los Alamos, bringing with him three other scholars from the school: Charles P. Baker, Lionel Daniel Percival King and Raemer E. Schreiber.

Daghlian, still a graduate student, joined them the following year after completing some scientific studies Holloway had started. He never told his mother or siblings (his father died in 1943) about being part of the secret Manhattan Project, and sister Helen reported only that FBI agents accompanied her brother every time he returned to the family home.

Life in New Mexico

By all accounts, Daghlian, a quiet and well-liked young man, fit right in with the rest of the brainiacs in New Mexico, enjoying at least one ski trip with the famed cowboy scientist Louis Slotin, a friend who tragically would be the second to die from a nuclear accident there.

At Los Alamos, a remote desert site designed to shield the Manhattan Project from prying eyes, Daghlian started in the Water Boiler group, later transferring to Critical Assembly, and finally becoming an assistant preparing the plutonium core for nuclear-reaction tests.

Silent footage documenting the Manhattan Project shows him walking past a car outside the ranch house where experiments were conducted. Following behind him is a tall, thin man with a broad-brimmed hat and dangling cigarette who appears to be Oppenheimer. He is also seen in the background of another film as the bomb is being assembled.

On July 13, 1945, three days before the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb in the Trinity Test, Daghlian was photographed with his sleeves rolled up as he helped load part of the weapon for delivery to the test site.

Daghlian witnessed the test of the world's first nuclear weapon in the desert of Alamogordo on July 16, 1945, and was also at Los Alamos in August when the first nuclear bombs were dropped in Japan on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing at least 100,000 people instantaneously (many more died later of radiation sickness and burns, among other residual effects).

The war's end came soon after, on Aug. 15, when Japanese Emperor Hirohito surrendered.

But Daghlian and dozens of other scientists kept working. And on Aug. 21, less than a week later, he would be exposed to a fatal dose of radiation in an inexplicable accident while "tickling the tail of a dragon," or attempting to bring a nuclear core to the brink of criticality required to set off an atomic explosion.

Accounts differ slightly, but everyone agrees that earlier that day Daghlian had been working on two critical-mass experiments using a 14-pound sphere of plutonium that required the use of tungsten carbide bricks to encourage an atomic reaction. During those experiments, other scientists were also present, as protocol required.

But after dinner and a lecture, around 9:30 p.m., Daghlian returned to do a third experiment, perhaps (according to his late sister, Helen) adding a twist of his own, but with only a security guard in the building, which violated protocol. During the testing, Daghlian reportedly was placing the last 10-pound brick by hand, as was normal, when he received a warning from sensors showing it would be dangerous to do so.

Attempting to withdraw the brick from the assembly area, he instead accidentally dropped it into the center, causing a so-called supercritical reaction that presumably could have led to an incident endangering others in the Los Alamos complex. Daghlian noticed an eerie blue light flash quickly, followed by a wave of searing heat.

Bravely or perhaps impulsively, Daghlian reached his right hand into the area to push away the fallen brick, but that wasn't enough to stop the reaction so he was forced to remove the entire pile by hand, no doubt understanding as he did so that he was almost assuredly a dead man.

According to one estimate, Daghlian received the highest dose of radiation anyone had ever been exposed to at the time, 510 rems (anything over 100 rems is considered life-threatening). He was immediately brought to the Los Alamos hospital, where his hand began to swell and nausea ensued. All symptoms pointed to acute radiation poisoning, a condition with no known cure.

A final visit

Soon after, his sister and mother, both living in New London, were flown to Los Alamos and ushered to his hospital bedside. Daghlian's sister Helen reported they were the first two Manhattan Project outsiders ever to be allowed on site at the mini city built in the desert, though they were told only that Daghlian had been injured in a chemical accident.

Helen, a longtime nurse at L+M who lived on Ocean Avenue, told The Day in an August 1985 interview with reporter Paul Baumann that Daghlian was alert all through his final days except the last. He did become a bit disoriented at night, though, so that's when she sat by his bedside.

"I stayed all night with him," she said.

But his symptoms only worsened, and the physical deterioration was sickening. Some have described it as a "three-dimensional sunburn."

"The radiation burns right through the bones," Helen Daghlian said.

Helen reported many of the great Manhattan Project scientists one by one coming to her brother's bedside to pay their respects, including the Nobel Prize winner who designed and built the first atomic reactor and warned of its dangers.

"I remember Enrico Fermi being there and coming in and asking Harry questions about what he had done," she said in the Baumann interview.

There are no reports that Oppenheimer himself came to visit Daghlian, though less than a week before the young man's death, on Sept. 9, the Manhattan Project director joined Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves as they showed reporters around the code-named "Trinity" project site where the first atomic bomb test had been performed, apparently in an attempt to diminish concerns about radiation on the site.

Finally, a little over two weeks after exposure on Sept. 15, 1945, at the age of 24, Daghlian died. As his memorial inscription acknowledged 55 years later, Harry Daghlian was the first American casualty of the atomic age.

Question of compensation

And his family, like many others in the nuclear age, received little in compensation for his death, though it was noted in a University of California report on the history of Los Alamos that Daghlian's mother was given a check for $10,000 (about $170,000 in today's dollars) from a revolving fund one day after her son's death as she headed back to New London.

"No death benefits under the Workmen's Compensation Act were due in this case, as Mr. Daghlian left no dependents," the report, released publicly in 1961, stated.

An investigation published in The New York Times Magazine in 1989 blamed the lack of acknowledgment of the government's role in exposing hundreds of nuclear workers and innocent civilians to nuclear radiation appeared to be a way to save the expense of lawsuits. In some cases, said investigator Clifford T. Honicker, radiation exposure records appeared to have been misplaced or perhaps were made to disappear by unknown government authorities who, like Groves, preferred secrecy over openness.

As for Daghlian's case, Honicker cited an interview with Manhattan Project scientist Philip Morrison in which he reported officials had purposely covered up the cause of death.

Groves in post-war congressional testimony finally acknowledged the risks of radiation poisoning, yet attempted to downplay the horrors by stating falsely "it is a very pleasant way to die." No one immediately knew the agony of Daghlian's death, which was not acknowledged as radiation poisoning until 1946, though it drew little attention at the time.

Schreiber, one of the Manhattan Project scientists from Purdue who was influential in getting Daghlian to join the Oppenheimer group, told The Day in 1985 that there was nothing that could be done to save him. Radiation poisoning typically results in vomiting, loss of body hair and the sloughing off of skin, among other excruciating symptoms.

His body was donated to science, per Daghlian's instructions, so the effects of radiation poisoning could be studied.

"He died of a complete breakdown of the cells," Schreiber, who has since died, told The Day.

Another death months later

Nine months after Daghlian's death, his friend and mentor Slotin, who had spent many days with the young scientist as he lay dying, would be exposed to radiation in much the same way doing a similar experiment (really an impromptu demonstration) by hand with the same plutonium core, though he received a much bigger dose and died only nine days afterward in the same bed Daghlian had occupied.

"Well... that does it," he reportedly said to the seven colleagues who had been there to witness the tickling of the dragon, including Schreiber, in what was to be one of Slotin's final experiments before leaving Los Alamos. He had to shut down the experiment in much the same way Daghlian had, by hand.

Soon after, scientists at Los Alamos, who had nicknamed the plutonium contraption "Rufus," started referring to it instead as "the demon core." They decided after Slotin's radiation exposure to develop remote-control methods to conduct criticality experiments thereafter.

Slotin's death in 1946 would soon be acknowledged as a case of acute radiation poisoning, and he received a hero's sendoff in his native Canada, with an estimated 3,000 attending his funeral.

Yet it would be years more before researchers pieced together the truth of Daghlian's death, which previously had been cited in classified documents that failed to mention his name.

Finally, on May 20, 2000, as siblings Edward and Helen Daghlian gathered at Calkins Park, about 200 feet from the former Waller School that the future scientist once attended, Haroutune Krikor "Harry" Daghlian Jr. was honored with the only memorial he would ever receive (in a final indignity, his last name is misspelled on the marker as "Daghiian"). The inscription on the small stone reads:

A brilliant scientist on the Manhattan

Project. His work involved the determination

of critical mass. During an experiment gone

awry, he became the first American casualty

of the atomic age. Though not in uniform,

he died in service to his country.

The Daghlian marker was the idea of a half dozen Bulkeley School classmates, by then 80-year-old men, who gathered with dozens of others to raise the Stars and Stripes at the Calkins Park flagpole, a stone's throw from his boyhood home at 95 Willetts Ave.

One of his boyhood friends, Lawrence P. Crowley, would write a column about Daghlian a decade later, saying, "It is a fitting location because we spent much of our boyhood playing in that park. Some games could be rough, like the time Harry broke his leg in a pickup football game."

Clearly, Harry Daghlian was used to taking chances. And his name occasionally crops up online, or in books, documentaries and the like. Lately, with the fame of the "Oppenheimer" movie causing people to research the Manhattan Project with more fervor, Daghlian's name has been resurrected in articles near and far.

Crowley, who died a few years ago, stated that one of the characters in the 1989 Paul Newman film "Fat Man and Little Boy" was loosely based on his friend, though others think the part played by John Cusack was a nod to Slotin or an amalgamation of several characters.

Daghlian also was referenced in an off-Broadway play in 2001, "Louis Slotin Sonata," which received mixed reviews from elderly Los Alamos scientists and relatives. Some, like Schreiber's widow, thought the drama portrayed the scientists sympathetically, while others said it showed an anti-nuclear bias.

In a way, the debate mirrored much of the angst that evolved from the Manhattan Project's unleashing of atomic energy, the most powerful man-made force in the universe. Do we celebrate the immense achievement of harnessing nuclear energy or do we lament its power to potentially destroy all of human civilization?

In the midst of such mind-bending issues, Harry Daghlian, the first American victim of the atomic age, has largely gone unnoticed, just a footnote in history, even in his hometown. And he certainly never received a hero's sendoff, since it took more than a half century to acknowledge his sacrifice.

"He didn't plan on dying," said sister Helen in 1985, thirty years before her own death and burial at Cedar Grove Cemetery. "I feel like he was doing what he wanted to do. And that was the important thing."

Day staff writer John Ruddy, The Day's copy desk chief, contributed sections of this story.