Demon Core: The Unused Third Atomic Bomb of WW2

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the desert can hold many secrets the desert near Los Alamos in New Mexico just after world war two held perhaps the biggest secret of them all may 21st 1946 a top-secret laboratory a group of scientists look on as one of their colleagues a Canadian named Louis Slotin conducts a demonstration Slotin hovers over a strange object which sits on display on a small table in front of the crowd of onlookers the object looks like a metal sphere nested inside a more substantial metal hemisphere like an egg in a nest but this metal device contains a terrifying potential why because there's nothing less than the exposed core of a nuclear bomb and the egg at the center is an orb of pure plutonium imagine being in that room you probably could have heard a pin drop such was the intense atmosphere slotin's demonstration was a risky one the operation he was performing had an ominous nickname among the group they dubbed it quote tickling the Dragons tail the Dragons tail this is a delicate procedure whereby the core is brought to the point of critical mass this creates a chain reaction of the weapons inner material which becomes self-sustaining the researchers at the Los Alamos lab had been conducting these types of experiments in secret for years to observe and stretch the limits of nuclear capability the potential not to mention the sheer danger of chasing this dragon's tail was immense Slotin was poised over the exposed core in his left hand he held a half shell of beryllium over the core even just a sliver of empty space between the cores service and the beryllium in his right hand he held a simple screwdriver by the screwdriver simply to use its flat-head tip to ensure the small sliver of space remained between the two components it was a demonstration Slotin had performed many times before it had become a sight so routine at the lab the one of his colleagues watching on a certain Ramos Reiber turned away to look at other work he just assumed there would still be some time before anything notable happened no one not even Schreiber could have anticipated what happened next a slogan continued to slowly lower the beryllium the screwdriver slipped in his right hand the beryllium hemisphere dropped making full contact with the exposed core the dragon was awake a flash of bright blue light torus of the lab accompanied by a blast of heat within moments a scene descended into chaos and terrified panic the Manhattan Project the laboratory in Los Alamos was part of a more extensive operation conceived by the US government as a way to harness the full power and potential of nuclear weapons on the eve of the USA's entry into World War two it was given the codename the Manhattan Project perhaps the most famous codename for any project in the military history the Manhattan Project was established in 1941 with the approval of then President Franklin D Roosevelt the project was composed of and led by American scientists with support from the United Kingdom and Canada and under the supervision of Major General Leslie groves it's true visionary though was the nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer who had been the director of the operations primary facility the already mentioned Los Alamos laboratory from 1943 to 1945 the lab was conceived as a remote facility but the project's researchers could conduct their work in a safe secret and secure environment Oppenheimer recommended searching the remote deserts outside of Albuquerque New Mexico where he himself owned a ranch the project settled on the Los Alamos location because of its natural beauty hoping that would inspire scientists to come and work there it was at the Los Alamos lab in the shadow of the pristine Sangre de Cristo Mountains where the world changed forever on July 16th 1945 in the whole nada de muerto desert in southeast New Mexico Oppenheimer and several other Manhattan Project scientists gathered to observe what would be called the Trinity tests a new type of plutonium weapon would be tested the very first of its kind its detonation would rely on an implosion in which criticality would be achieved by surrounding explosives within the weapons casing this in turn would implode or literally squeeze out the plutonium core at the center it was Oppenheimer's idea to test the implosion device in New Mexico arguing that quote the implosion gadget must be tested in a range where the energy release is comparable with that contemplated for final use if it were unclear what Oppenheimer was referring to when he said final use it would not be for long the next month on August 6 1945 a simple gun type atomic bomb code-named little boy was dropped in Hiroshima Japan the weapon used a crude detonation technique in which a core of uranium-235 was fired into a second duranium core three days later on August 9th a more complex weapon using the same plutonium core base design as the one detonated in the Trinity test was dropped on Nagasaki Japan this bomb codenamed fat man killed over a hundred thousand people and effectively forced Japan's surrender to the Allies the deadly duo known as fat boy and little man together to change the course not only of a war but humanity itself and not necessarily for the better the demon core Otto Robert Frisch was an Austrian physicist who fled from Nazi Germany to Western Europe where he became a specialist in nuclear fission Frisch eventually worked as part of the British delegation at the Manhattan Project before finally moving to the United States and joining the team at Los Alamos in earnest Frisch's primary responsibility while at Los Alamos was overseeing the research and development of enriched uranium weapons like the type that would be used in the little boy bomb over Hiroshima but his other major work in his time at the lab was leading the critical assembly group which included among others Harry DeLeon and a man already introduced a certain Louis Slotin Frisch was responsible for the concealing of the Dragons tail experiment his Manhattan Project colleague Richard Feynman noted the danger involved with the procedure and came up with the phrase tickling the Dragons tail to insinuate that if anything went wrong it would be like waking the sleeping dragon the first two plutonium cores developed by the Manhattan Project the historic first core used in the Trinity test and the second which was detonated over Japan received the bulk of the attention the project actually produced three plutonium cores at the cost of over 500 million dollars each and that was in nineteen forty's dollars the third core originally given the nickname of Rufus had been built as insurance it was intended to be used as a third weapon against Japan if needed but with the war ending the third core did not have an immediate military purpose so Rufus was thus kept safe and secure at Los Alamos to be used further in their research and experimentation when some needed however in a tragic turn of events the Corps did end up living up to its destructive purpose and its time at Los Alamos it took the lives of two scientists and was given a new more fearsome nickname as a result the demon Corps the tickle the first scientist to fall victim to the demon Corps as a 24 year old scientist named Harry K deadly and jr. who joined the team at the Los Alamos lab in 1944 while still a graduate student on the afternoon of August 21st 1945 just two short weeks after the Nagasaki bombing dag lien was performing a criticality experiment involving the demon Corps he was trying to construct a neutron reflector this work involves placing 10-pound bricks of tungsten carbide by hand around the plutonium core to see what number of bricks and in what arrangement would cause the core to go into critical mass the neutron reflector would theoretically reduce the mass required to allow the bomb to reach criticality and yes he was doing this so-called bricklaying using his hands dad lien performed the operation that afternoon Laura left successfully he had brought the core close enough to criticality to end the experiment there however dad lien wanted to push it further he returned to the lab alone that night and repeated the steps he laid out the bricks around the core as he had that afternoon and prepared to try adding one more to the arrangement but as deadly and moved the final brick into place the neutron readers monitoring the experiment gave off a CodeRed alert if Dad lien placed the last brick the core would over perform and reach a super critical mass this meant that once the chain reaction started would become uncontrollable dad leaned in a panic pulled his hand holding the brick quickly away but in doing so he inadvertently dropped the brick directly over the plutonium the demon core already in a near critical state went supercritical in nuclear jargon going supercritical there's never a good thing similar to the earlier description of louis slotin's accident there was a flash of blue light and an explosion of hot air dad lien recoiled but he managed to knock the errant final brick off the core and onto the ground in the process in doing so however he received a fatal dose of radiation from the diamond core 25 days after the accident the scientists fell into a coma and died he was the first official fatality from a criticality accident in the hospital that lien would slowly succumb to the radiation taking hold of his body who was visited by several of his Manhattan Project colleagues Louis Slotin his peer in the critical assembly group in particular was a constant presence at his bedside just seven months after dad Lien's accident slogan would become the second physicist to be claimed by the demon core it happens again when Louis Slotin himself slipped in the lab may 21st 1946 everyone in the room knew instantly just how dire the situation was Slotin had managed to flip the beryllium orb away from the core but as in deadly ins accident the damage had been done after recovering from the shock of the reaction the blue flash and the extreme heat one of the scientists called an ambulance the monitoring equipment in the room calculated the number of reactions from the event at 3 quadrillion over a million times smaller than the atomic bomb detonation but still a fatal amount of radioactivity to release into the room slotin confused and agitated began to take readings of various object in the room to get a sense of the amount of radiation they had absorbed he read in the empty glass bottle a hammer a measuring tape that's have disoriented he was ironically the detector itself had also been hit with the blast and his readings were useless the lab was evacuated and the ambulance has arrived all of the scientists present for the experiment were taken to the Los Alamos hospital for evaluation Slotin the man closest to the core at the time of the reaction was in the most obvious danger he vomited once before arriving at the hospital and several times again over the following hours his health at first seemed somewhat stable though it quickly deteriorated for the worse his left hand the one holding the beryllium in the part of his body closest to the core became extremely painful and eventually became blue and lifeless covered in welts and blisters it was estimated that his hand had been exposed to over 15,000 REM of x-rays the catastrophic amount since that there would be no recovery slotin's parents flew into New Mexico from their hometown of Winnipeg Canada by the time they arrived his body was failing rapidly his white blood cell count had dropped severely along with his temperature and heart rate the internal damage to his organs and tissue created extreme nausea and constricting pain the result of what one of his doctors called quote a 3-dimensional sunburn the demon lurks Louis Slotin would die nine days after the horrific incident in that Los Alamos lab three of his colleagues remained hospitalized after his death though all three ultimately survived Alvin graves the next man closest to the core after slotin lived the rest of his life with chronic neurological and vision issues before succumbing to a heart attack at the age of 55 as a result of the depth of Slotin and deadly and the criticality experiment at Los Alamos were put on indefinite hold the work had always been dangerous and the scientists knew the risk of working with such unstable and hazardous materials however the US military did them no favors by placing such immense wartime and post-war pressure on their productivity with world war ii behind them the military could no longer justify the potential human cost of such highly dangerous work even with a new enemy in the guise of the Soviet Union the safety protocols and regulations were looked at with a newly skeptical eye and a special committee was created to evaluate all future experiments it was agreed that going forward remote controls and mechanical arms would be used to allow scientists to keep a distance from nuclear materials as observant slotin's experiment even a few feet of distance could make all the difference surely this should have been self-evident to men is brilliant and well-educated as these men were the demon Corps itself had been slated to be detonated at a demonstration in front of thousands and Bikini Atoll a remote outcrop of land and the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific but after slotin's death the test was canceled due to both the surprising power of the Pacific detonations and the demon core is lingering radioactivity the demon core was unceremoniously melted down and recycled to lurk in a new series of unidentified cores [Music]

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Channel: Dark Docs

Views: 748,434

Rating: 4.7863154 out of 5

Keywords: demon core, tickling the dragon, documentary, nuclear, experiment, in the world, ww2, wwii, world war 2, manhattan project, nuclear bomb, atomic, the demon core, louis slotin, world war ii, atomic bomb, los alamos, nuclear weapons, atom bomb, history documentary, science, fission, history, war, los alamos national laboratory, criticality accident, the manhattan project, dark docs, dark5, dark 5

Id: 76LgE75OnKI

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Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2019

Reddit Comments

Thanks for posting, this is the exact one I was looking for earlier!

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/Unknown_Observer 📅︎︎ Nov 16 2019 🗫︎ replies