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kimster12271988
10-26-2014, 06:52 PM
The Third Core’s Revenge

By the end of August 1945, there had been a total of three plutonium cores created in the entire world. Everyone knows about the first two. The first was put into the Gadget and detonated at Trinity in July 1945. The second was put into the Fat Man and detonated over Nagasaki in August 1945. The third, however, has been largely overlooked.

The third core was was destined to be the Third Shot dropped on Japan, had there been a Third Shot. Instead, it has a different story — but it was still not a peaceful one.


The Third Shot was unlikely to have been ready by the time Hirohito announced Japan’s acquiescence to the American surrender demands (August 15), that satisfies the question of why another one wasn’t used. In a very practical sense, it does, but it ignores the fact that Truman actually put a “stop” on all further atomic bombings on August 10 — when the effect (if any) of the bombs on Japan’s high command was yet unknown. He did not, it is worth noting, put a stop on firebombing: huge B-29 raids continued up until the surrender announcement.

But the story of the third core doesn’t end there.

The core was cast sometime around August 13th, but still likely needed to be pressed and coated, ergo the need to take until August 16th to finalize. By August 15th, it became clear that it wasn’t going to be needed in the war. So it was kept at Los Alamos.

On August 21st it was being used for critical mass experiments — “tickling the dragon’s tail.” The experiments in question involved surrounding a full 6.2 kg core with tungsten carbide, getting information about the effect that different tamper arrangements had on criticality. (The tamper reflects neutrons back into the core, thus increasing the overall neutron economy and thus lowering the effective critical mass.)

The experimenter in question was 24-year-old physicist Harry Daghlian, Jr. To quote from a report on the experiment:

"[Daghlian] was carrying one brick [of tungsten carbide] in his left hand over the assembly, to place it in the center of the fifth layer. While he had this brick suspended over the assembly, he noticed (from the instruments) that the addition of this brick would have made the assembly supercritical if placed on top of the assembly.
Having realized this, he was withdrawing his left hand and the brick from over the assembly and while doing so the brick slipped out of his hand and fell immediately onto the center of the assembly. Knowing that this brick would made the assembly dangerous, he instinctively and immediately pushed this brick off the assembly with his right hand. While doing this, he stated that he felt a tingling sensation in his right hand and at the same time noticed a blue glow surrounding the assembly, the depth of the blue glow being estimated to be about two inches."

Daghlian was estimated to have received a 510 rem dose of ionizing radiation — a usually lethal dose. He died after an agonizing month. This, incidentally, appears to have been why at the time of the August 30 audit, the core was in Quality Control: they were checking to make sure it had not undergone any “dimensional changes” as a result.

One might think that someone involved with the investigation of the Daghlian accident would be especially cautious around using such a core in further critical mass experiments, even if only for superstitious reasons. But exactly 9 months later, one of the co-authors of the above-cited report, Louis Slotin, would himself receive a lethal radiation dose from the exact same core in the process of yet another (different) critical mass experiment. Slotin knew the experiment in question was dangerous, and had been told by Enrico Fermi that he would be “dead within a year” if he continued to work with such bravado. Like Daghlian, his hand faltered at a literally critical juncture: he was holding a neutron reflector above the core with a screw driver when his fatal slip occurred, lowering the reflector just a fraction of an inch, releasing a stream of neutrons and the characteristic blue glow. Slotin died 9 days later.

The third core, by now nicknamed the “demon core” for having taken two lives, would not go out with a whimper. By some accounts, it found its final disposition in the first postwar nuclear test, shot “Able” of Operation Crossroads on July 1, 1946, just under a year after it had been first cast, in that all-night session, in the closing days of World War II. Encased in a “Fat Man” assembly with “GILDA” stenciled on its hull, it was finally dropped from a B-29, as it was originally intended to be, and it detonated over a fleet of empty ships in the Bikini atoll, with a yield of 21 kilotons. Alas, the journalists who saw it, with perhaps higher expectations for their first atomic bomb test, incorrectly dubbed it a flop.

That a single plutonium core could go through so much may seem remarkable. But it is a reflection of a time when such cores were extremely rare commodities. And so a single core could simultaneously be the one originally destined for the “third shot,” and also be the subject of two fatal criticality accidents, and also still be the first core consumed by postwar nuclear testing.

It is a potent reminder of how paltry the American nuclear arsenal once was — when there were less than a dozen pieces of cores, much less cores themselves.