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The Demon Core
The following is an article from the newest volume of the Bathroom Reader series, Uncle John’s 24-Karat Bathroom Reader.
The real-life story of a small ball of plutonium, the people it killed, and the researchers who blew it up.
THE BOMB
On the evening of Tuesday, August 21, 1945, American physicist Harry Daghlian was working at the U.S. government’s ultra-secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He was performing a very delicate experiment: Daghlian was placing brick-shaped pieces of metal around a chunk of plutonium, the highly unstable fuel used in most nuclear bombs. And he was making it more unstable with every brick he placed around it.
Daghlin (pronounced “DAHL-ee-an”) was part of the government’s Manhattan Project, which since 1942 had worked to develop the world’s first atomic bombs. And they succeeded: Just a few weeks before Daghlian’s experiment, two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs had killed at least 100,000 people immediately, and many tens of thousands more in the days that followed. Less than a week after those bombings Japan surrendered to Allied forces, ending World War II.
For Daghlian and his fellow scientists, that meant there was much more work to do.
NEW AND IMPROVED
The United States was the only country in the world with nuclear weapons at the time, but the government knew that wouldn’t be the case for long. If America was going to survive in a world with nuclear-armed enemies, it was reasoned, the nation was going to have to keep producing these weapons, and make them even more effective. This was precisely the reason that Daghlian was doing the particular work he was doing that night at Los Alamos.
Harry Daghlian was just 24 years old. He’d been brought into the Manhattan Project in 1943, while he was still a physics student -and an exceptionally brilliant one- at Indiana’s Purdue University. He had helped in the development of the bombs used in Japan, which, their devastating effects aside, were actually not very good nuclear bombs. They were, after all, only the second and third ever exploded (one test bomb had been detonated in New Mexico just three weeks before the two in Japan).
One of the chief issues for the scientists was determining how to take full advantage of the bomb’s nuclear fuel. Amazingly, both bombs used in the attack on Japan used only tiny fractions of their fuel to produce their explosions. (Imagine if they had used it all.) And using a bomb’s fuel efficiently is all about the neutrons.
THE NEUTRON DANCE
The most common type of fuel used in nuclear weapons is a type of plutonium known as plutonium-239, or Pu-239.
* Pu-239 is naturally radioactive, meaning that its atoms naturally emit particles from their nuclei. Some of those particles are neutrons. (This is known as neutron radiation.) Neutrons are very large, as atomic particles go -so large that if a neutron emitted from one atom happens to strike another atom, it can actually “break” it, and cause the second atoms to eject some of its own neutrons. (This is the “split” in “splitting the atom,”and scientifically, it’s known as fission.)
* This process happens normally very slowly, because most of the radiating neutrons just fly off. The whole idea behind nuclear weapons is to contain those neutrons within the plutonium, thereby speeding up the splitting process -with neutrons smashing atoms, causing more and more neutrons to be emitted, smashing more and more atoms- until it is completely out of control.
* The numbers involved in this chain reaction are almost too big to fathom: In a nuclear bomb explosion, atoms of the nuclear fuel are split by neutrons trillions and trillions of times …in hundreds of billionths of a second. Because each split of each atom releases energy, the combined splitting of trillions of atoms in such an impossibly short amount of time releases an absolutely phenomenal amount of energy -hence the power of atomic bombs.
And that small box that Harry Daghlian was building that night in August 1945 was all about containing the neutrons.
more …
In 1955, the Atomic Energy Commission started getting complaints from Nevada citizens about nuclear testing. After all, who wants a nuclear test in their backyard? The government responded by publishing a booklet aimed at placating local civilians. The accompanying cartoons make a nuclear blast seem like any other day, with just a few fireworks added. See more at The Atlantic. Link -via Gorilla Mask
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Well, we bombed the Moon, so I don’t know why anyone would be surprised that we’d nuke the ocean too. Although I imagine it was a rather unpleasant experience for the passengers and crew of the ship that got swallowed up by the massive tidal wave that ensued in the aftermath of the atomic explosion.
A secret corps of photographers and filmmakers documented US nuclear testing in the 1940s through the ’60s. The “atomic moviemakers”, officially known as the Lookout Mountain Laboratory, established in 1947, made at least 6,500 films for the government.
Two new atomic documentaries, “Countdown to Zero” and “Nuclear Tipping Point,” feature archival images of the blasts. Both argue that the threat of atomic terrorism is on the rise and call for the strengthening of nuclear safeguards and, ultimately, the elimination of global arsenals.
As for the atomic cameramen, there aren’t that many left. “Quite a few have died from cancer,” George Yoshitake, 82, one of the survivors, said of his peers in an interview. “No doubt it was related to the testing.”
Link -via the Presurfer
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When most of us think of someone riding a bomb, the image of Slim Pickens in the movie Dr. Strangelove comes up. But he was far from the first character to do so, as you’ll see in this collection of photographs and art at Oobject. Link -via Jason Kottke
Fifty-nine years ago today was the first time a television audience got to watch an atomic blast broadcast live as it happened. KTLA in Los Angeles hid a crew on the roof of a hotel in Las Vegas, waiting for the top secret Ranger Easy bomb test in Frenchman Flats, Nevada. The blast went off at 5:30AM on February 1st, 1951. Viewers got up early to see their TV screens go white.
We stayed on the air, they waited for the right time, and all of a sudden there was the flash. The people watched it, Gil described it, Lane talked about it, and that was our telecast. That one flash. You just see this blinding white light. It didn’t seem real. We didn’t have videotape. You couldn’t say, “Let’s look at it again.”
A year later, all the networks carried live coverage of nuclear tests. Link
Wired also has a collection of nuclear bomb videos. Link
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(image credit: US National Archives)
Do you ever think bad luck follows you around? Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on a business trip to Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945 when the US dropped the first atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns and stayed overnight before going home -to Nagasaki. Now 93 years old, Yamaguchi has been certified as the only person to survive both atomic bombs.
“As far as we know, he is the first one to be officially recognized as a survivor of atomic bombings in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Nagasaki city official Toshiro Miyamoto said. “It’s such an unfortunate case, but it is possible that there are more people like him.”
Certification qualifies survivors for government compensation — including monthly allowances, free medical checkups and funeral costs — but Mr. Yamaguchi’s compensation will not increase, Mr. Miyamoto said.
Link -via Metafilter
