That Time A Boy Scout Built A Nuclear Reactor In His Yard
That shed at the neighbor’s place is glowing for a reason
“The typical kid [working on their merit badge] would have gone to a doctor’s office and asked about the X-ray machine. Dave had to go out and try to build a reactor.”
— Barbara Auito,Treasurer of Boy Scout Troop 371, The Radioactive Boy Scout by Ken Silverstein
I’m sure in your life you’ve had some strange neighbors with interesting kids. You’ve probably had experiences with them breaking a window when an errant baseball flew the wrong direction. Maybe they threw parties or did things to annoy you? At worst maybe one of these kids was a bad seed and got in trouble with the police.
David Hahn happened to be a different breed entirely. He’d do things in his teenage years that stretched the limits of the imagination. Living in a quiet Detroit suburb, he was the image of the average American kid. He was an avid Boy Scout and a bit of a nerd. In his free time you’d catch him reading books. There was nothing that would make anyone look twice — except if you knew him well.
As Kevin Silverstein explains, one random day towards the end of June in 1995, neighbors would notice a scene out of a movie. Almost a dozen men, some armed, charged on the property of…
