The Blue Flash That Melted Human DNA — The Terrifying Truth of the 'Demon Core'

Описание: In the shadowed labs of Los Alamos, amid the frantic final days of the Manhattan Project, a 14-pound plutonium sphere—forged as the core for a third atomic bomb that Japan would never see—languished after surrender. Christened the "Demon Core" only after claiming its first victim, this grapefruit-sized mass of plutonium-gallium alloy, warm and deceptively inert, became the site of fatal hubris. On August 21, 1945, 24-year-old physicist Harry Daghlian, working alone against protocol, stacked tungsten carbide bricks around it in a perilous game dubbed "tickling the dragon's tail." One slipped brick triggered a supercritical flash of blue Cherenkov radiation, dosing him with over 5 sieverts—his hand, bare and unshielded, absorbed the worst as he shoved it away. Twenty-five days later, his organs liquefied from the inside, marking the first lab criticality fatality.

Nine months on, on May 21, 1946, Louis Slotin—architect of Nagasaki's bomb—demonstrated the same brinkmanship to colleagues, parting beryllium hemispheres with a mere screwdriver for separation. The tool slipped; hemispheres kissed; heat and blue glow erupted, slamming Slotin with 21 sieverts while others survived lesser doses thanks to his instant flip-off. For nine agonizing days, conscious and dictating symptoms to physicians, his body rebelled—blistered hands, vanishing leukocytes, internal hemorrhages—before death at 35. The Demon Core, twice cursed by accident, met its end melted into Bikini Atoll tests, but its legacy endures as a stark testament to nuclear peril's razor edge.

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VERIFIED RESEARCH SOURCES

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
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https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/death-l...
Search Term: "Louis Slotin"


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