Somewhat similar: during the early nuclear bomb design work, people would sometimes perform criticality experiments by hand on plutonium cores. There were, naturally, accidents, with two people dying immediately and several others dying years later likely due to the radiation exposure.
The fellow holding the plutonium hemispheres apart with the tip of a screwdriver http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin had previously distinguished himself by going swimming in an active nuclear reactor. Possibly no-one will ever surpass his achievements as likely the greatest eejit in the history of nuclear engineering.
Off topic: I've heard people refer to Hiroshima/Nagasaki as a "bluff" in that there was no third (fourth) bomb to drop if Japan hadn't surrendered. This article indicates otherwise. The Demon Core would have been the next bomb to be dropped, and was ready to go. So the USA wasn't bluffing, and was in fact prepared to keep dropping bombs one after the other.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core