Dur­ing the hol­i­days I noticed that San­ford Lawrence Simons had died of can­cer aged 92 in Lit­tle­ton, Col­orado. In 1950 he became known to the press as the “plu­to­ni­um col­lec­tor” after he was arrest­ed by the FBI for steal­ing a sam­ple of the dead­ly new radioac­tive ele­ment from Los Alam­os. Simons had been part of the Man­hat­tan Project dur­ing the war. But in 1946, he had removed a glass vial from the weapons lab­o­ra­to­ry. It con­tained a small amount of the ele­ment that had been at the heart of the Nagasa­ki atom­ic bomb.

In 1950, a few months after Leo Szi­lard had explained to the Amer­i­can peo­ple on nation­al radio how a nuclear dooms­day device could be cre­at­ed, FBI offi­cers raid­ed Simons’ home on the out­skirts of Den­ver and, after a brief search, dis­cov­ered the stolen plu­to­ni­um hid­den beneath the house. In the draw­er of a dress­er, the FBI men also found sev­er­al pieces of ura­ni­um.

That day the 28-year-old research sci­en­tist was led away in hand­cuffs. After­wards his daugh­ter remem­bers him jok­ing about the arrest. But at the time it was no laugh­ing mat­ter. I described what hap­pened and the media reac­tion to it in my book Dooms­day Men.

Simons, who had trained as a met­al­lur­gi­cal engi­neer, read­i­ly admit­ted tak­ing the radioac­tive mate­r­i­al, but he claimed it was just a “sou­venir” of his time at Los Alam­os, which he left in July 1946. Flanked by two impas­sive FBI men wear­ing Humphrey Bog­a­rt fedo­ras, Simons talked freely with jour­nal­ists after he’d been com­mit­ted for tri­al. Unshaven and hand­cuffed, though still clutch­ing his pipe, Simons seemed remark­ably unfazed by his predica­ment. Under the Atom­ic Ener­gy Act he faced a pos­si­ble max­i­mum sen­tence of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Just a few weeks ear­li­er, the FBI had arrest­ed Ethel and Julius Rosen­berg in New York on sus­pi­cion of atom­ic espi­onage. They were both con­vict­ed the fol­low­ing year and, despite inter­na­tion­al pleas for clemen­cy includ­ing from Ein­stein, the cou­ple were sub­se­quent­ly exe­cut­ed in the elec­tric chair.

“Why did I take it?”, said Simons sheep­ish­ly, in answer to reporters’ ques­tions. “Well, it seems pret­ty sil­ly now, but I’ve always col­lect­ed min­er­al sam­ples. I real­ized almost instant­ly that I didn’t want it, but it was like hav­ing a bull by the tail. I couldn’t let go!”

One of the press men asked how he man­aged to smug­gle the plu­to­ni­um out of the top-secret mil­i­tary research lab­o­ra­to­ry.

Simons grinned: “I just walked out with it.”

He explained that the plu­to­ni­um sam­ple had been lying around on his desk for some time. No one had asked for it back and even­tu­al­ly he sim­ply couldn’t resist it.

“There was no real check-up on what was tak­en out of the place at that time,” he added with a shrug.

You wouldn’t have guessed it from what Simons said, but in the 1940s fis­sile ele­ments such as plu­to­ni­um were more pre­cious than gold to the atom­ic bomb project. They were the result of a vast expen­di­ture of mon­ey and effort. Whole cities of work­ers laboured to pro­duce these lethal ele­ments in vast indus­tri­al com­plex­es spe­cial­ly built for the Man­hat­tan Project. Each gram was the prod­uct of thou­sands of man hours. It was not unusu­al to see sci­en­tists down on their hands and knees, sweep­ing the floor with Geiger coun­ters, hunt­ing for the small­est stray piece of met­al that might have been dropped.

Some­times the Geiger counter would crack­le furi­ous­ly as it passed over a tiny orange or black speck on someone’s lab coat, reveal­ing the tell-tale signs of dan­ger­ous radioac­tiv­i­ty. Even the small­est scrap of fis­sion­able mat­ter was extreme­ly valu­able and as a result lab coats were treat­ed rou­tine­ly with chem­i­cals to reclaim these ele­ments. The jour­nal­ists pressed the FBI agents who arrest­ed Simons as to how much the plu­to­ni­um in the vial was worth. Even­tu­al­ly one said he’d heard fig­ures rang­ing from $500 to $200,000.

San­ford Simons hid the stolen plu­to­ni­um under his house. He had good rea­son to. Plu­to­ni­um has been called the most dan­ger­ous ele­ment on earth. With three small chil­dren, Simons want­ed it out of reach. The glass vial and its dead­ly con­tents remained in its hid­ing place for four years. The FBI only became aware of it after they were tipped off. Simons had let slip in con­ver­sa­tion with a friend that he had some plu­to­ni­um. Per­haps his sense of guilt led Simons to make an unwise com­ment. Or maybe, just once, this mod­est sci­en­tist was tempt­ed into an idle boast. But in the year that Sen­a­tor Joe McCarthy was stok­ing fears about a Com­mu­nist fifth col­umn infil­trat­ing Amer­i­can soci­ety, to admit that you had a key ingre­di­ent for an atom­ic bomb stashed in your home was sim­ply ask­ing for trou­ble.

Out­side the court­room, a reporter put it to Agent Rus­sell Kramer that tak­ing plu­to­ni­um as a “sou­venir” was a rather corny excuse. The FBI man nod­ded and said, with­out a trace of humour, “He’s a pret­ty corny guy.”

Dur­ing his tri­al, the defence point­ed out that Simons had nev­er been in trou­ble with the police. More impor­tant­ly, he was not a “Red” and had no “Com­mu­nist con­nec­tions.” The defence attor­ney based his case on the pop­u­lar image of the sci­en­tist. He argued, some­what uncon­vinc­ing­ly, that sci­en­tists are “all darned fools” when it came to exper­i­ments. He claimed that sci­en­tif­ic curios­i­ty alone had prompt­ed Simons to take the plu­to­ni­um and ura­ni­um in 1946. It was a case of the irre­sistible allure of for­bid­den knowl­edge, your Hon­our, and, as every­one knew, no sci­en­tist worth his slide-rule could resist that.

But Judge Lee Knous was not par­tic­u­lar­ly impressed by this defence. For tak­ing a pinch of plu­to­ni­um, the dis­graced sci­en­tist was sen­tenced to 18 months in a Fed­er­al prison.

When I was writ­ing Dooms­day Men, the sto­ry of the Plu­to­ni­um Col­lec­tor and the media’s inter­est in it struck me as a won­der­ful exam­ple of the pub­lic fas­ci­na­tion with both sci­en­tists and the new atom­ic forces which they had unleashed. For some rea­son, since writ­ing the book I’ve often thought about Simons and his dan­ger­ous desire for the new ele­ments. At the time I didn’t explore what hap­pened to him after his imprisonment. For­tu­nate­ly, it turns out that his brief spell behind bars didn’t blight his career. Accord­ing to his obit­u­ary, Simons became an inven­tor, run­ning his own bio­med­ical instru­ments com­pa­ny in Col­orado. In that same piece, jour­nal­ist Ann Imse says he was “known for his intel­li­gence, imp­ish per­son­al­i­ty, pet fer­ret and, in his lat­er years, ter­ri­fy­ing­ly wild dri­ving on moun­tain roads.”

But I bet he nev­er for­got the time when he first picked up that valu­able though dead­ly sam­ple of plu­to­ni­um and realised that he could sim­ply pock­et it and walk out of the top-secret Los Alam­os lab­o­ra­to­ry. It’s not sur­pris­ing that Simons wasn’t the only Los Alam­os sci­en­tist who longed to own a sou­venir of the Man­hat­tan Project. Otto Frisch, whose cal­cu­la­tions of crit­i­cal mass were cru­cial in the ear­ly stages of the atom­ic bomb project, shared Simons’ dan­ger­ous fas­ci­na­tion with the new atom­ic ele­ments. When the sil­very blocks of high­ly fis­sion­able ura­ni­um-235 were first deliv­ered to Los Alam­os in April 1945, Frisch felt an over­whelm­ing “urge to take one”. They were the first sam­ples ever made of ura­ni­um-235 met­al, the ele­ment that would blast the heart out of Hiroshi­ma. Strange­ly, Frisch thought the heavy met­al would make a nice paper­weight.

I’m glad things went well for Simons, after his brush with the FBI in 1950. In my book I explored how the world became obsessed with the dreams and night­mares of the atom­ic age, ter­ri­fied by mad sci­en­tists and filled with hope by saint­ly ones, such as Ein­stein. Despite his one brief moment of atom­ic mad­ness, San­ford Simons seems to have been a reas­sur­ing­ly ground­ed sort of guy. An every­day kind of sci­en­tist. And in the end I guess that’s the best kind there is.

 

If you’ve enjoyed read­ing this post, which is based on my book Dooms­day Men, then you might like to con­sid­er read­ing the whole book.

You can buy absurd­ly cheap copies of it now on Ama­zon, or if you real­ly want to sup­port me and my writ­ing you might like to con­sid­er buy­ing the e‑book. You can buy it direct from Pen­guin (ePub) or from Ama­zon in the UK (Kin­dle), or Barnes & Noble (Nook) in the US. Thanks for read­ing!