On August 13, 1945, at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, the ” devil core ” was ready. That’s the name scientists give to a sphere of purified plutonium being kept here.
Exactly a week ago, the US Air Force dropped ” Little Boy “ on Hiroshima, followed by ” Fat Man “ in Nagasaki. The two bombs wiped out at least 160,000 people, or a third of the population, at the time of their detonation.
The time and consequences of radiation contamination will still put the number of victims in the millions, but Japan has not yet surrendered.
In the US, a second “Fat Ma n” complex is waiting to be loaded with the ” devil core” . This 6.2kg mass of radioactive material is the heart that gives it its destructive power.
With the power compressed in a sphere less than 9 cm in diameter, the ” demon core ” should have awakened a square kilometer-wide portal of hell right above the Tokyo Imperial Palace, destroying the whole city and sucking it down. at least one third of the population.
But history eventually took a different fork. On August 15, 1945, Japanese radio broadcast a recording of Emperor Hirohito announcing his acceptance of unconditional surrender to the Allies.
The ” Demon Core “ was kept at the Los Alamos Laboratory to continue serving a project called Y for short. It was around this time that successive accidents with the plutonium block erased the original ” Rufus ” code that it was called.
From here, Rufus transforms into the ” demon core “.
The first accident occurred less than a week after Japan surrendered, just two days after the third atomic bombing mission was aborted. Although not released into Japan, the energy mass trapped in Los Alamos still finds an opportunity to kill.
Its first victim was Harry Daghlian , a young physicist just 24 years old. Daghlian has been involved in atomic bomb testing since 1943, when he was a student at Purdue University.
Along with other scientists on the Manhattan project, Daghlian knew that both the bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not yet reached their full potential. Only a small part of the bomb core explodes, leaving the rest of the nuclear fuel to waste.
At that time, the United States was the only country in the world that had successfully developed a nuclear bomb. But they also knew that this unique position would not last long, as the Soviet Union was also pushing ahead with its own nuclear programs.
To keep the edge, the Manhattan Project scientists had to make their bombs more effective.
And they built a ” devil core ” to test that, a sphere of plutonium and gallium purified at the threshold of ” – 5 cents “, which is 5% less than the critical mass – the smallest mass of the material. fission is necessary to maintain a stable nuclear chain reaction.
The task of Daghlian and the scientists at the Los Alamos Laboratory is to try to get as close as possible to the supercritical state of the ” devil core ” – when neurons ejecting from a nucleus can trigger neurons to fire. from another nucleus, creating a chain reaction that leads to an explosion.
To illustrate the dangers of this type of experiment, they nicknamed it ” dragon tail tickling “. Just imagine there is a sleeping dragon, your task is to come from behind it, tickle its tail several times to determine the dragon’s tolerance threshold before it wakes up.
No matter how many ticks you have calculated to know, if you are too lucky, the dragon will wake up and immediately burn you to ashes. That is exactly what happened to Harry Daghlian.
On the night of August 21, 1945, Daghlian returned to the laboratory after dinner to do the experiment himself. There was no other scientist supervising him other than a security guard. This clearly violated the safety protocols at Los Alamos.
To be able to ” tick the dragon’s tail ” and bring the ” devil core ” closer to the critical state, Daghlian stacked bricks made of tungsten carbide around it. Because the mass of tungsten matter is so dense, it can reflect neutrons emitted from the ” devil core ” back to itself.
This will cause the ratio of neutrons to hit the atom and the fraction of atoms to split in the core, breaking the fragile ” -5 cents ” safety margin that is preventing the chain reaction that leads to the explosion.
It was a dangerous move, so in order to know when to stop, Daghlian turned on a radiation counter while lining up tungsten bricks one by one around the “demon core” .
When the wall is more than 25 cm high, the counter rotates wildly and swings uncontrollably. Daghlian knew he needed to yank a piece of tungsten out quickly. But a moment of panic caused him to drop it right on top of the ” devil core “.
A blue spark flashed along with a heat wave that followed with a radioactive explosion. The counter hissed every now and then. Daghlian panicked and grabbed the tungsten on top of the “devil core “, but his hand went hot and dropped it again.
Attempting to overturn the lab table but it was too heavy, in the end, Daghlian had to fight alone in the middle of the radioactive stream, using his hands to pick up each piece of tungsten around the plutonium block.
The chain reaction finally stopped, the radioactive counter went silent. Unfortunately, everything was too late. One minute is enough time for Daghlian to be exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. The hand he used to pick up the burned and blistered tungsten pellets.
Within hours, Daghlian began to feel the first symptoms of radiation exposure, nauseated, and was rushed to the emergency room. After three painful weeks, Daghlian fell into a coma and died on the 25th day after the accident with the “demon core “.
The security guard on duty that day with Daghlian was also exposed to radiation but fortunately escaped death. Even so, the radiation damage was enough to cause him to develop acute myeloid leukemia, a form of blood cancer, and die 33 years later.
The ” Demon Core ” killed two men, one of whom was its creator. But they weren’t the final sacrifices yet.
After the accident that resulted in Daghlian’s death, the Los Alamos Laboratory tightened nuclear safety regulations. But this change was still not enough to prevent a similar accident from happening nine months later.
On May 21, 1946, physicist Louis Slotin – one of Daghlian’s colleagues was trying to repeat the ” dragon tail tickling ” experiment. Without using tungsten bricks, this time Slotin wanted to create a stream of reflected neutrons by covering a beryllium dome just above the ” devil core “.
Beryllium is also a neutron-reflective material, and to avoid repeating Daghlian’s mistake of pushing the plutonium core to the extreme, Slotin placed a screwdriver under the beryllium dome. The screwdriver maintains a small slot, acting as a safety relief valve allowing neutrons to have a way out.
Before that, Slotin did this experiment many times, until that fateful day, the screwdriver slipped out and the beryllium dome fell down.
Raemer Schreiber, a scientist who stood with Slotin in the room to witness the experiment describes the moment. As soon as he heard the beryllium dome collapse, he felt a rush of hot air hit him and saw a flash of blue light.
” The blue flash was very visible in the room, although it was flooded with light coming in from the windows and ceiling lights ,” Schreiber wrote in the report after surviving the accident. ” The total duration of the flash did not exceed one tenth of a second. Slotin reacted very quickly to flip the screwdriver out.”
But the “demon core” still managed to reach the supercritical state for the second time in a year. The accident this time was much more serious than the previous explosion, because besides Slotin, there were 7 other people in the room who witnessed the experiment.
Six scientists, a photographer and a security guard were exposed to radiation. Slotin was the worst hit, with a more lethal dose than Daghlian. The moment he stepped out of the lab, he started to feel nauseous and had a headache.
Slotin was admitted to the hospital for rehabilitation treatment. However, the situation quickly deteriorated and he lost weight a few days later. The pain tormented Slotin for 9 days before he showed signs of psychosis and died.
Not long after, the person closest to Slotin in the room in Los Alamos, the physicist Alvin Graves, was also hospitalized. Despite being shielded by Slotin, the radiation still caused Graves to suffer long-term health problems such as losing his sight and dying 18 years later from radiation-related complications.
Marion Edward Cieslicki, another physicist present when the experiment took place, also died at the age of 42 from acute myeloid leukemia, 19 years after the accident. Photographer Dwight Smith Young died after 29 years, from aplastic anemia also related to radiation.
Two deadly accidents with plutonium within a few months of each other finally pushed the Los Alamos Laboratory to the point of having to re-establish the entire radiation workflow. Manual tests with plutonium are required to cease altogether.
Instead, scientists are now forced to use remote-controlled machines, and are only allowed to indirectly manipulate the radioactive core at a distance of hundreds of meters. They also stopped calling the plutonium core ‘ Rufus ‘. From then on, it was only known as the ” demon core “.
After Slotin’s accident caused the radiation levels of the ” demon core ” to increase, scientists thought they should not touch it anymore. Plans to put this ” devil core ” in a nuclear bomb and test it at Bikini Atoll were also shelved.
Instead, the plutonium was melted down and put into the US nuclear stockpile, to recast other cores as needed. For the second and last time, it refused to explode.
While the deaths of two scientists can’t be compared to the horror if the ” demon core ” were used to strike Japan’s nuclear for the third time, it’s easy to see why scientists gave it the name. so superstitious.
Followed by many strange and coincidental details about the deaths surrounding it. Both Daghlian and Slotin were killed by the ” demon core ” on the 21st Tuesday of the month. They even passed away in the same hospital room.
Of course, that was merely a coincidence. The ” Demon Core ” doesn’t actually carry the demon’s curse. If there was, it was just a curse man-made while hastily crafting a weapon of tremendous destructive power.
And the real horror – besides the terrible effects of radiation poisoning – is the inability of 20th-century scientists to protect themselves from the constant dangers of joking experiments. .
Although with the knowledge and lessons learned from themselves and their colleagues, they are fully aware of the risks that may be encountered. Still, Stolin was able to casually poke a plutonium core with a screwdriver.
Schreiber was there that fateful day, to hear the first words Slotin uttered after he lost his screwdriver: ” Wow, that’s hard to bear .” That seemed to be what Slotin wanted to say to his colleague, Daghlian.
He knows what will happen next. And he calmly accepted.