‘Boy Scout’ follows teen’s fascination with nuclear power
Where have all the chemistry sets gone?
Like Lincoln Logs and Erector Sets, starter kits for young scientists were almost standard issue for mid-20th century kids, especially boys. With beakers, test tubes and household chemicals, their fertile minds were marshaled for the charge into the Atomic Age.
David Hahn, however, grew up in a different time — the 1980s and ‘90s — when home video games were the diversion of choice. So, considering the strange scientific path this teenager from suburban Detroit followed, it was fitting that his guide was an out-of-print book from that post-war period, “The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments.”
In “The Radioactive Boy Scout,” Ken Silverstein explores the life of the precocious boy whose nuclear ambitions put a town at risk and triggered an emergency response from the federal government.
From fooling around with fireworks, Hahn quickly graduated to more advanced experiments in the “Golden Book,” such as a recipe for chloroform that knocked him out cold. While his peers played sports, he was busy concocting a tanning lotion derived from celery. Further adventures in tanning led him to a local slaughterhouse, where he bought pituitary glands from cows to extract a hormone that would increase pigmentation.
The backdrop for his audacious — and increasingly dangerous — experiments was a family fractured by divorce. With an oblivious father in one home and a mentally unstable mother in the other, Hahn retreated into his improvised labs, including one in a backyard potting shed.
Even though he struggled in school, Hahn’s uncanny grasp of complicated scientific concepts led him to a fascination with physics, radioactive elements and nuclear power.
As he chronicles Hahn’s transformation into a teenage mad scientist, Silverstein lays the blame on the boy’s neglectful parents and, indirectly, on the Boy Scouts — one of the few institutions of normal childhood Hahn stuck with, if only because it offered an atomic energy merit badge.
With a boy’s naive faith in the magic of nuclear energy, Hahn launched his ultimate experiment: a small-scale reactor in his backyard lab. With guidance from unwitting experts at Nuclear Regulatory Commission and elsewhere, he scraped together radioactive materials from smoke detectors, camping lanterns, gun sights and other sources.
The accompanying explanation of isotopes and elements tends to drag down Silverstein’s narrative, diluting the dramatic clicking of Hahn’s homemade Geiger counter as his secret project starts to get hot. Although it was no Three Mile Island, Hahn decided to disassemble the apparatus when he detected radiation beyond the vicinity of his mother’s house.
Hahn stashed some of the still-hot materials in the trunk of his Pontiac, which police discovered in an incident that Silverstein seems to gloss over in something of an anticlimax. One would assume the triggering of the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan in suburbia would lend itself to a more dramatic telling.
Thankfully, the author follows up with Hahn, who joined the Navy after high school. The squandering of his upstart intelligence makes him something of a tragic figure. But even as he swears he has buried his nuclear obsession, he can’t seem to drop it. The author even learns later of a mysterious prospecting trip to uranium country in Canada.
Silverstein’s book grew out of an article he wrote for Harper’s magazine in 1998, and some digressions on the Boy Scouts and reiterations of Hahn’s lack of parental guidance seem like padding. But he has told an odd and uniquely American story, the radioactive remnants of which are still buried in a Utah landfill.