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Podcast: North Star with Ellin Bessner
Episode: Louis Slotin, a little-known Canadian, helped build the real-life atomic bombs portrayed in ‘Oppenheimer’
Description: In one of the summer’s buzziest blockbuster films—Oppenheimer, about the real-life Jewish head of the top-secret American wartime Manhattan Project—the film’s director neglected to include an important Canadian figure.
A Jewish scientist from Winnipeg, Louis Slotin was a key part of the team of groundbreaking researchers at the Los Alamos atomic laboratories. He helped build and assemble the bombs that would be dropped on Japan in 1945, ultimately ending the Second World War.
Slotin’s family thought he was researching medical uses for nuclear radiography. They only learned the truth after he was killed in a controvers...