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IIRC the work with Demon Core was described as "tickling the dragon's tail", not "following the checklist". Wikipedia also mentions "Slotin's own unapproved protocol".

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You are right, it's a different point - just trying to illustrate that being some of the smartest people on earth doesnt mean you wont make a terrible mistake or will have good judgement.

Like they knew it was super dangerous, there wasn't new science discovered since then about this particular setup. Today rank and file engineers know not to do that

Also how could there be a checklist? They were literally pioneers

An easy way to create one would be to ask "what could go wrong" and "how bad would it be", then develop procedures to minimize the risk.

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