Original subtitles

Tonight on Secrets Declassified.

Experiments considered so wild, dangerous, or deadly, they have to be

from the public.

From building an aircraft carrier made of ice to defeat Nazi U -boats.

This thing will be the largest naval vessel ever constructed.

To a manned mission to Mars that never leaves Earth.

These men are subjected to every form of stress that their Soviet overlords can

think of. Or even to Stalin's obsession with understanding his rivals.

They want to profile Mao by analyzing his poo.

These are the astonishing and sometimes terrible things done by governments and

the people who work for them.

It's time to bring them to light.

It's World War II.

In the Atlantic, Hitler's U -boats are hunting British ships relentlessly.

So Britain gambles on a daring experiment.

Build an unthinkable ship, not from steel, but from ice.

By 1942, Britain feels like it's against the ropes.

U -boats hunting in the mid -Atlantic are sinking 650 ,000 tons of shipping

every month.

The killing zone is called U -Boat Alley. It's a stretch of the Mid

where Allied ships are unprotected.

Air Force planes can't reach that far from land bases, and the British can't

send aircraft carriers to help because they would be sunk by the U -Boats, too.

What they need is an aircraft carrier that can't be sunk.

Enter Jeffrey Pike, an eccentric adventurer and inventor now working for

HQ.

Jeffrey Pike comes up with the realization that nature already produces

unthinkable platforms in the ocean. They're called icebergs.

So he comes up with the idea that you could flatten one and tow it wherever

wanted it to be. You can use it as an unthinkable aircraft carrier, and it can

close the mid -Atlantic gap.

But Pike soon realizes icebergs won't work.

nasty tendency to flip, which would put your aircraft and your crew in the cold

Atlantic water. So, no, not a good solution.

Pike won't be stopped so easily.

He begins to design an artificial iceberg.

Pike's idea is to create a giant aircraft carrier, not from steel, but

blocks of carved ice.

He can have a system of cooling pipes throughout the ice to keep it frozen.

and also use diesel engines to propel it forward.

At a secret lab, hidden in a refrigerated storage unit at London's

Meat Market, Pike's team starts experimenting.

There's one big shortcoming with ice. It is extremely brittle.

If it came under enemy attack, it will fracture.

So as Pike considers this problem, he takes some inspiration from reinforced

concrete, and the idea that... Perhaps combining water with another element

would produce a harder ice product.

Pike's team begins to experiment with additives to increase the durability of

ice. They find a research paper from scientists in Brooklyn, New York,

cotton as a reinforcer. But this makes a slushy, uneven ice block.

Finally, after lots of experimentation, they come up with just the right recipe.

and that is 4 % wood pulp and 96 % water. This combination creates an

durable block of ice.

Pike's new ice behaves like nothing else on Earth.

It's strong as concrete and almost bulletproof, but can be cast like metal

cut like wood.

They named this new miracle material Pikerete after its inventor.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is the kind of guy who likes unusual,

bold, daring ideas. So he says, yeah, let's do this.

Pike's project is given the code name Habakkuk.

Habakkuk is an Old Testament prophet who records God's promise to the doubtful.

I'm going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you

were told.

Pike chooses the name to fit his impossibly ambitious ice ship.

Now he needs to construct a prototype.

But Britain is too warm to build it.

So the entire project moves to Canada.

They turn the frozen surface of Patricia Lake into a giant laboratory and build

a 1 ,000 -ton, 60 -foot -long scale model.

The Habakkuk team starts experimenting.

And they find that in order to keep the ice stable, the ship's refrigerators

need to keep it at a frosty 5 degrees.

They also discover that to stop a torpedo, the hull has to be at least 30

thick.

When they complete their design, it is an absolute behemoth.

Pike wanted an ice ship with a runway 2 ,000 feet long and 300 feet wide.

It has 40 -foot thick walls, and it can carry over 150 bombers at one time.

This will be the largest naval vessel ever built.

Project Habakkuk is now becoming hugely expensive, so it needs American backing.

In August 1943, at the Allied Conference in Quebec, the Brits make their pitch.

To prove the properties of Picrete to the Americans, one of the U .K.'s top

commanders, Lord Mountbatten, stages a demo.

Mountbatten gives U .S. General Hap Arnold an axe and asks him to smash a

of Picrete. Arnold swings at the Picrete with all his might. The axe bounces

off. Then Mountbatten draws his pistol and fires it at the Picrete.

The bullet ricochets off, sending the generals diving for cover. The room

erupts. But the point is made. The Americans are on board for Habakkuk.

Before production can begin, the tides turn in the Atlantic.

Long -range aircraft and new anti -submarine tactics blunt the U -boat

With the crisis over, the ice ship is no longer needed.

In January 1944, Project Habakkuk is canceled.

The prototype ship they'd built on Patricia Lake is allowed to melt away.

Soon, the war comes to an end.

But the British military keeps details of Pike Creek on ice for the next 30

years. We only learn the full details through declassified documents that were

discovered in 1973.

They speak to an hour of desperation.

when England faced an existential threat as a result of the U -boat.

Winston Churchill isn't the only leader to greenlight an audacious experiment.

When the Soviets decide to beat the U .S. to Mars, three cosmonauts are locked

in a test chamber for a year -long study.

They learn that it's not the equipment that fails, it's the crew.

In Moscow, leaders are convinced that getting to Mars will definitively win

space race. For the Soviets, putting a man on Mars would be a massive prestige

win.

But a round trip to Mars would take a full year.

At the time, no one knows whether humans can survive that long in space.

Moscow's Institute of Biomedical Problems hatches a bold experiment.

They call it a year in a spaceship, but they run it at their labs in Moscow.

The plan is to lock up a cosmonaut test crew for 365 days inside a cramped metal

box. They want to find out if the team can endure such a long space flight and

what the scientists need to do to make it work.

Soviet leadership signs off on the Space Chamber plan.

On November 5, 1967, the top secret experiment begins.

In order for this experiment to provide any meaningful results, the three

cosmonauts are going to have to be actually isolated. The only contact that

will have with the outside world will be through a radio channel, and everything

will be documented on film.

So the men locked inside, the chamber feels more like a prison cell than a

starship. There is no privacy. The living quarters are just 10 by 13 feet

not built for comfort.

The crew has a table, a stove, some medical gear, and three flimsy fold -out

bunks.

Soon, the conditions begin to take a toll on the cosmonauts, and the space

chamber becomes a psychological pressure cooker.

Within a few weeks, all of them are showing signs of psychological stress.

They're no longer enjoying any collective activities together. They

almost at each other's throats all the time.

Within two months, The crewmen are not speaking to one another. If they're

holding these churlish grudges against one another, they're not a cohesive

They're not an effective team.

With the experiment at risk, the scientists take action.

They build a 200 -square -foot greenhouse and dock it with a simulated

The greenhouse gives them a little bit of dignity to get away from one another.

It gives them something positive and constructive to do with their time. And

suddenly, rather than being at each other's throats constantly, they're back

being a cohesive team again.

With the experiment back on track, the scientists decide to stress test the

crew. They simulate a failure of the chamber's life support systems.

The Soviet lab administrators massively raised the concentration of carbon

dioxide in the capsule.

They crank the temperature up to 86 degrees. They push the humidity to a

tropical 90%. All of the subjects are suffering from headaches and exhaustion.

It feels like hell in space.

The extreme conditions force the crew to cooperate.

On November 5, 1968, after a full year inside the space chamber, the experiment

comes to an end.

The most important lesson learned is that claustrophobia and monotony are two

the biggest challenges a cosmonaut crew will face on the way to Mars.

For years, the full details of the secret space chamber experiment remain

deep in Kremlin files.

It's not until 1975 that they're finally revealed to the world, when cosmonaut

Andrei Bozhko publishes his memoir.

He actually described the feelings that he and his fellow participants had

living inside this tiny capsule for a year.

Although the cosmonauts never actually leave Moscow, the lessons learned from

the experiment prove useful for planning future space missions.

If we're going to send somebody to Mars, you can't just simply put them in a

capsule and expect them to endure a 34 million mile voyage.

You have to provide more space for them. Otherwise, the mission is going to fail

because the individuals are going to fail.

At the start of the Cold War, the U .S. wants to know more about biological

weapons, how to protect against them, or how to use them.

To learn more, the Pentagon comes up with a top -secret experiment.

The target?

Unsuspecting American cities.

At the beginning of the 1950s, the Pentagon is terrified that the Soviets

launch a biological attack against the United States.

In the event that such an attack was released on the U .S., what would

Everything is, at this point, an unknown quantity.

The Army Chemical Corps is tasked to investigate.

The Chemical Corps consider several options.

The first one they come up with is using a wind tunnel to see how it disperses,

but that's nothing like real -world conditions.

The second option they consider is building a city in the desert. However,

turns out to be too expensive.

And the third option is to do live testing in real U .S. cities, but

using a real biological agent, use a stand -in.

They start by looking for a safe substitute for deadly germ weapons.

Chemical core scientists find this apparently ideal candidate. It's a

fluorescent powder used in TV screens called zinc cadmium sulfide.

What makes this powder so ideal is that the individual grain sizes are very

similar to the sizes of the known biological agents that an adversarial

may use.

The other thing about them is that they fluoresce under ultraviolet light.

So it's easy to track them wherever they go.

Initially, at least, the Army thinks that the substance is harmless.

What they didn't know then, but we do know now, is that cadmium is a top -tier

carcinogen. It causes lung cancer and kidney cancer.

In January 1953, the experiment is ready to begin.

The Army wants to study how a biological agent would spread to an entire city.

The question is, what city?

The Army needs cities in the United States to be an approximate match for

corresponding Soviet cities.

In the event that one day the U .S. wants to carry out some sort of chemical

biological attack against a Soviet city.

First up is a viable proxy for brutally cold Leningrad.

Minneapolis in Minnesota.

Here, they want to find out how a biological weapon might get inside

types of buildings. To cover up what they're doing and reassure the public,

come up with the story that they're testing a smoke screen to protect the

from Soviet missiles.

Local authorities are eager to help, so they sign on.

The Army selects a range of testing locations, factories, office buildings,

one site stands out.

Clinton Elementary School.

They mount sprayers on the roof and release clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide

the surrounding building and the playground.

Inside the school, they put detectors to measure how much zinc cadmium sulfide

is seeping in.

What the Army learns from all of this is that even during the winter, when

everyone's largely sealed up in interior spaces,

The pathogen is still going to find its way into those spaces.

That means there is nowhere to hide from a biological attack of this sort.

By February 1953, the Army decides to scale up the experiment.

How would a bioweapon spread across a bigger city, like Moscow?

They set their sights on St. Louis, Missouri.

The Chemical Corps focuses their experiments on the Pruitt -Igoe housing

project. They put sprayers on the rooftops of all 33 towers to start

zinc cadmium sulfide. Other sprayers are mounted inside vehicles, and those

squirt out toxic powder while they drive around.

Over two years, the chemical core sprays more than 2 ,000 pounds of zinc cadmium

sulfide over just 10 square miles of St. Louis.

The results are disturbing.

In urban canyons between tall buildings, wind turbulence disperses the particles

vertically.

But in open spaces like parks, they linger at ground level.

In an attack, some places are going to be largely spared, while others are

to be devastated.

Next, the Army wants to understand the spread over multiple states.

So it launches its biggest experiment yet, called Operation LAC, Large

Area Coverage.

An aircraft is loaded with zinc cadmium sulfide.

and it sprays it during a flight from South Dakota to Minneapolis.

The results are alarming.

That's because they detect particles from that flight 1 ,200 miles away.

It proves that even with a small quantity of a pathogen distributed in

it can reach a much broader geographical area.

Over the next 10 years, the U .S. Army Chemical Corps conducts 200 experiments

with zinc -cadmium sulfide in a geographical region stretching from the

Mountains to the Atlantic coast, affecting 40 different states.

The Chemical Corps learns that a single tank of weaponized biological agents can

spread disease to an area three times the size of New York City.

By the end of the 1960s, The Army has the information it needs. The

are wrapped up and the details are buried under top -secret classification.

The Army keeps the experiments hidden for decades.

Then, in 1994, the truth is revealed.

When journalists publish their findings, the public is...

Outraged, and rightly so. These were experiments done on unwitting Americans,

and the experiments could potentially have been deadly.

The Army maintains that, yeah, cadmium may be a dangerous chemical, but the

amounts of exposure were so low, they were non -toxic.

This entire operation suggests the mindset during that era of the Cold War.

you're talking about the survivability of the country in a biological,

or nuclear attack, There's very little that the U .S. government was unwilling

to do.

At the end of the 1940s, the Soviet Union and China begin talks over

alliance. Stalin wants a deeper understanding of Chairman Mao, so he

scientist into Mao's bathroom.

Communist China's leader, Chairman Mao Zedong, rolls into Moscow aiming to

an alliance with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin.

Stalin sees Mao as something less than him, and he has no problem keeping him

waiting. In fact, he keeps him waiting for days.

This insult is a deliberate ploy. The issue is that Stalin, as is often the

with Stalin, doesn't trust Mao.

And he's letting him wait for days on end because he wants to get into Mao's

head. He wants to figure out what makes the man tick.

While Mao waits in Moscow, Stalin turns to his secret police.

He orders the NKVD to conduct a bizarre experiment, which will remain secret for

over six decades.

He wants them to build a complete psychological profile of the Chinese

starting in a very unusual place.

It sounds insane, but one of the ways that they plan to do this is by

who he is, getting a piece of him, if you will.

They're going to analyze his poo.

For years, the NKVD labs have been running a bizarre and top -secret

experimental program in scatological research.

That's the study of excrement to gain intelligence.

The theory is simple.

Soviet scientists believe a person's waist can provide insights into their

psyche.

Stalin's team is under the impression that high levels of the amino acid

tryptophan in the poo indicate a calm and approachable personality.

The deficiency in potassium could be an indication of a nervous and

unpredictable person.

To run their tests, the NKVD needs one key thing, a sample from the chairman

himself.

Mao gets invited to the Kremlin to have talks with Stalin, but the NKVD makes

sure that those talks get delayed day after day after day.

While Mao is waiting...

The Kremlin staff serve up a series of elaborate banquets for him and his team.

Huge feasts piled high with delicacies.

But this lavish hospitality is a trap.

Really, they're just looking to ensure that the man has to have a bowel

there in the Kremlin. And they have a specially rigged toilet that they want

to use.

NKVD agents install special collection toilets.

These don't connect to the sewers.

Instead, they funnel the waste into special containers.

It's a dirty trick.

Eventually, the NKVD succeeds in collecting some of Mao's products.

Once collected, the samples are rushed to a classified lab where a team of

dedicated scientists meticulously analyze them.

They test for tryptophan, potassium, and other chemicals.

things that they ultimately think are going to be indicative of Mao's mood.

The excrement experiment is reportedly a success. The NKVD team sends a detailed

scatological, psychological portrait of Mao directly to Stalin.

The report about Mao sent to Stalin has never been found, so the details inside

it are lost to history.

What we do know is that after reviewing the scatological profile, Stalin is said

to be scathing about Mao's communist credentials.

This man is a radish, he declares.

He's only red on the outside, but his insides are white.

This makes Stalin very wary of engaging in any significant partnerships.

The Chinese leader leaves Moscow with a watered -down treaty and none of the

financial support he's been hoping for.

Stalin's scatological lab doesn't last much longer. After he died in 1953, his

successors didn't have the same predilection about analyzing the

humans.

The experiment remains classified for the next six decades.

Then in 2016, former Russian agent Igor Adamanenko reveals Stalin's

obsessions.

He reports that he's found the details of this poop research in a declassified

file within Soviet archives.

Revelation makes headlines worldwide.

As one of the Cold War's most bizarre experiments is finally brought to light.

As World War II comes to an end, millions across Europe are on the brink

famine.

To maintain order, the U .S. must figure out how to help them.

So, far from the front lines, the War Department begins an extraordinary

experiment, intentionally starving healthy American volunteers.

By 1944, Allied forces are ashore in Normandy. They're driving the enemy, and

they will soon be in Germany itself.

Allied leaders are about to face a new challenge.

Millions of civilians across the war zone are on the edge of starvation, and

it's going to be the job of the victors to feed them back to health.

To be prepared, they need to understand how people's metabolism changes as they

experience malnutrition, and that has never been studied properly.

Enter Dr.

Ansel Keys, a physiologist at the University of Minnesota and special

assistant to the U .S. Secretary of War.

To solve the famine problem, Keyes proposes a dangerous and controversial

experiment. He wants to do a controlled study under lab conditions of human

starvation and recovery from starvation.

The War Department likes the plan and gives Keyes its backing.

Now he needs volunteers who are willing to starve for their country.

To get useful results, Keyes wants to use healthy young men for the

but... Most of those are off fighting in the war, but not all of them.

Keys identifies an untapped pool of healthy young men who are still in the U

.S., conscientious objectors.

Keys recruits using a brochure signed off on by the War Department.

On the cover is a picture of starving children, with the text reading, Will

starve that they be better fed? It's an emotional appeal, but it works.

More than 200 men volunteer.

Keys picks... 36th of the healthiest and most psychologically stable candidates

to be his guinea pigs.

He sets up a facility literally underneath the bleachers at the

Minnesota so that the men are away from prying eyes.

In February 1945, the starvation phase of the experiment begins.

To start, he splashes the men's daily calorie intake in half.

Keys wants to impose a reduced calorie intake, but also make the subjects burn

more energy by exercising.

So he puts them through the Harvard Fitness Test, which is a series of

that are designed to push people to the limits of their endurance.

The effects of starvation are swift and shocking.

The subjects drop around 20 % of their body weight in the first 12 weeks.

Their ribs are sticking out. They've got no energy. They're just...

Wilting. One subject gets himself trapped in the department store's

door. He's just too weak to push himself through.

And it's not just physical. As the weeks go by, the starving subjects are

getting irritable, they're getting depressed, and not surprisingly, they

totally obsessed with food.

Two men get into a physical brawl in a canteen line over a scrap of pasta.

That's how complete this...

Session with food becomes for them. They're fighting even over a couple of

scraps.

One individual starts having visions of cannibalism. He's fantasizing about

food, and he reaches the limits of his mental endurance.

Look at that generous helping of rich, juicy barbecue.

He actually sneaks out of the study, goes into town, and engages in a massive

caloric binge in the form of milkshakes and ice cream sundaes.

After six months, the starvation phase finally ends.

Next comes the refeeding.

He's believed that by gradually increasing the subject's calorie intake,

safely feed them back to health without triggering any negative reaction.

He splits the subjects into four groups, and the different groups get different

amounts of extra food.

Some groups are also given extra protein and vitamins, while others just get the

base amount of carbohydrates.

Now a new and dangerous problem arises.

Their body weight continues to plummet, even though they're re -nourishing these

test subjects.

Keyes discovers that the men are shedding retained edema fluid that's

masking just how much weight they've lost. This is a potential disaster for

study. To get the experiment back on track, Keyes decides to supersize his

portions.

Doubles the calories for the group. And to the relief of the scientific team, it

worked. The men finally began to recover.

Keyes realized that in refeeding a starving population, vitamins and

were really a luxury. It was the calories that mattered. They needed at

,000 calories a day.

Keyes passes that information on to the War Department, who immediately put it

to practical use in post -World War II Europe.

Keyes wraps up the experiment in October 1945.

But his complete findings remain hidden.

It's not until five years later that he finally reveals the data in his

masterwork, The Biology of Human Starvation.

The results of the starvation experiment are used worldwide in famine relief.

In 1979, Soviet scientists are secretly experimenting with deadly bacteria.

And when a lab technician makes a simple mistake,

An entire city will pay the price.

The U .S. and the Soviets have signed a treaty banning biological weapons

research. The Soviets are looking to get an edge and have no problem cheating.

They're continuing research to create even more dangerous weaponized diseases.

In the city of Sverdlovsk, laboratories at Compound 19 are running three shifts

a day, working to develop a killer weapon using anthrax.

Anthrax is a deadly disease caused by the bacteria Bacillus anthracis.

If inhaled, its fatality rate is up to 90%. Even a fraction of a milligram

can kill.

It's perfect for a weapon because the spores are tough enough to be delivered

a bomb and small enough to disperse after the explosion as an invisible

mist.

Compound 19's goals are absolutely terrifying.

Inside airtight chambers, scientists are testing new anthrax strains in aerosol

form on monkeys hoping to create a deadly super weapon.

They're attempting to create a new strain that does not respond to

This work is incredibly dangerous, not just for the workers, but also for the

citizens in the surrounding city.

Compound 19 uses a complex system of filters to purify the contaminated air

before it gets vented into the atmosphere outside.

The lab's safety system seems foolproof, but its chain of protection is only as

strong as the weakest link.

On Friday, March 30th, that link snapped.

A technician is finishing up the afternoon shift on an anthrax production

and he shuts down as normal before the next shift comes on duty.

He notices that there's a filter that's clogged. He takes it out, and he leaves

a note letting the next shift know that, hey, I've taken it out. This needs

attention.

Now, this is where the safety protocols break down.

The officer in charge fails to make a note in his logbook, and the

note gets lost.

The next shift comes on, and the anthrax production line gets going again.

The machinery is switched back on.

What the scientists don't realize is that the critical filter is still

When the plant is restarted without the filter in place, it begins to pump out

anthrax aerosol into the cold night air.

A steady wind carries this invisible cloud of deadly spores right over the

sleeping city of Sverdlov.

It seeps into buildings, getting inhaled by unknowing citizens.

No one realizes for hours that this has happened.

When a technician at Compound 19 finally fought the error, they shut down the

line and replaced the filter. But it's too late.

It doesn't take long for the anthrax to take effect.

The first victims have no idea what's hit them.

32 -year -old Riza Shmirnova is working at a nearby ceramics factory when a co

-worker notices her hands are turning blue.

She's rushed to the hospital.

She's feverish, struggling to breathe, and slips into a coma.

Over the next few days, more people fall sick with mysterious flu -like symptoms

that progress to respiratory failure and then to a horrible, choking death.

Soon, the hospitals of spread love...

are overwhelmed with victim at least 64 people die local doctors

are baffled the symptoms are indicative of inhalation anthrax but that almost

never happens in nature when that starts to really sink in terror seizes

the city kremlin officials realize that compound 19 secrets are about to be

exposed

So they dispatch agents to contain the fallout.

The KGB comes in and enforces a citywide cover -up.

They confiscate patient files.

They take autopsy reports. They even bring in trucks that spray down the town

with chlorine bleach that turns the trees yellow.

News of that many deaths is bound to leak out within the Soviet Union and to

West. So the Soviet authorities create a cover story.

They say the deaths are caused by gastrointestinal anthrax, which is

explainable by citizens eating contaminated meat that they bought on

market.

Moscow keeps the deadly lab leak hidden for more than a decade.

Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapses.

A new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, comes to power and soon reveals the

truth about the Sverdlovsk incident.

Yeltsin spills the beans. He's trying to be a good partner and demonstrate to

the West that he's trustworthy, and he lets it be known that, no, it had

to do with black market meat.

Harvard bioweapons expert Matthew Meselson gets permission to investigate

further. He travels to Sverdlovsk, he tracks down survivors, and he talks to

families of the dead.

He confirms exactly what Yeltsin's admitted to. This was caused by military

development.

In 1994, Meselson finally publishes his research paper, and it conclusively

reveals that the Sverdlovsk incident was caused by weapons research at Compound

19.

That accident caused the deadliest recorded anthrax outbreak in human

After the U .S. dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, World War II is over.

But the plutonium core of a third bomb is ready and waiting at the Los Alamos

National Laboratory.

Scientists put it to use there in experiments that are so dangerous, they

it the Demon Core.

The war is won, and America's atomic whiz kids are now working to master the

apocalyptic power they've unleashed.

Louis Floten is a 35 -year -old physics prodigy working at Los Alamos Lab.

He has a pretty impressive resume. He's a veteran of the Manhattan Project, and

he's also known as a bit of a cowboy, both in his style of dress as well as

fearless approach to science.

He's doing experiments to understand how to make the plutonium bomb more

efficient. He is a physicist who is absolutely brilliant.

But he certainly is someone who's willing to bend the rules if it helps to

enhance his persona as a risk taker.

In May 1946, just weeks before he's set to leave Los Alamos for a teaching job,

Slotin heads into the lab to show his replacement how to do his signature

experiment, working directly on the leftover plutonium bomb core.

The core is a softball -sized sphere of weaponized plutonium alloy.

It's so radioactive that it's warm to the touch. It's so dangerous that it's

given the nickname the Demon Core.

The Demon Core is constantly emitting subatomic particles called neutrons. If

those neutrons can escape freely, the core remains stable.

But if those neutrons are somehow trapped in the core and build up, it'll

unstable and effectively become a bomb.

His mentor, the nuclear pioneer Enrico Fermi, warns him about the experiment.

If you keep doing it, you'll be dead within the year. But he keeps on doing

The audience is transfixed as Slotin gets to work on the demon core.

To get his data, Slotin must intentionally edge the demon core toward

explosion while trying to stop just short of triggering one.

He lowers a neutron -reflecting beryllium shell over the demon core and

how many neutrons start building up inside it.

This is incredibly useful.

for the scientists, but also incredibly dangerous.

The closer the shell gets to the core, the closer the core comes to a

supercritical state.

If the beryllium shell closes completely over the demon core, the energy inside

will build up to supercriticality in a catastrophic instant. And that means

either a burst of radiation or an all -out explosion.

Los Alamos has rules for everything.

You need to, right? You're dealing with some of the most dangerous substances on

Earth. And the regulations Los Alamos puts in place is to use wooden spacers

keep the two hemispheres of these shells apart.

Slotin, however, as the cowboy, decides to do it his own way. Instead of wooden

spacers, he uses a flathead screwdriver to wedge open these two shells just

enough to keep it from going critical.

It's a reckless method, but it works.

In his left hand, he holds the shell of the core. In the right hand, a

screwdriver with a flat tip just between the two halves of the hemisphere.

After tempting fate, Slotin's luck finally runs out.

The screwdriver slips, and the gap snaps shut.

There's a silent, blinding flash of blue light.

And then a wave of heat sweeps across the room.

Radiation is expanded in every direction.

Slotin knows it's too late for him to run. He immediately lunges forward and

rips the beryllium shell off with his bare hands.

This quick decision breaks the chain reaction and puts the demon core back to

sleep. He saves the lives of the other men in the room, but it's too late for

him. Being so close to the demon core, Slotin's absorbed a massive dose of

radiation.

Slotin's left hand feels like it's on fire.

A sour metallic taste fills his mouth.

As he leaves the room, he begins to vomit uncontrollably.

On the way to the hospital, Slotin turns to one of the observers and he

apologizes. I'm sorry I got you into this, but I have less than a 50 % chance

living. And even that was optimistic.

Over the next nine days.

Slotin's body slowly disintegrates. He has what's known as three -dimensional

burns, which is essentially a sunburn inside of his body. He also has gangrene

and massive organ failure.

On May 30th, he dies in agony, a victim of the Demon Corps.

Although Slotin's death makes the papers, for decades the full details of

fatal Demon Corps experiment are buried under top -secret classification, hidden

for over a quarter of a century.

Finally, in 1989, the New York Times publishes the full story and reveal

the true horror of the Demon Core experiments to an unsuspecting public.

From toxic tests in black -site labs to bold ideas that push back the boundaries

of human knowledge, Governments have long conducted extraordinary experiments

secret. Though it may take years, the covert science eventually finds its way

into the light.