Alright, I'm gonna be honest; I picked the topic of this video purely for the name
alone. It's the motherfucking Demon Core! Like fuck, man, that shit is evil! I'm
going to church after I record this - I gotta cleanse my fucking soul just
after hearing the name. It sounds like it's like straight out of a videogame or
something, like you know some serious shit is going down when the characters
start talking about that Demon Core. Like buckle up, bitch, shit's about to get real.
The Demon Core was a six kilogram sphere of plutonium. It was designed to be used
as the core for a third World War II nuclear bomb.
However, after Japan surrendered, testing continued on the core anyway. So where
did it get the name 'Demon Core'? Well actually it was originally called 'Rufus'
which is a fairly innocuous name. It's like a name someone would give to their
Jack Russell and God I hate those fucking dogs; those little shits.
What kind of transition do you have to go through to go from mildly annoying to
soul consuming? First, I have to explain some physics. Now I'm no scientist -
in fact, like most YouTubers I am indeed a fucking imbecile - so I'll explain it to
the best of my understanding but if you're a physicist or anything feel free
to explain in the comments why you're no fun at parties. "Critical mass" is a term
in nuclear physics which means the smallest amount of fissile material
needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction. So basically, if an object
reaches critical mass or goes supercritical, some bad shit is about to
happen. Obviously, this concept is pretty
important for making nuclear bombs - you want your bomb to go super critical when
you detonate it. Now lots of bombs were made pretty close
to critical mass so that it's easier to detonate them - you don't want to drop a
bomb that doesn't fucking go off. Unfortunately, this makes them more prone
to accidents. Rufus was designed to be 5% below critical mass so that they had a
pretty small safety margin when they were fucking around with this thing.
Tests of nuclear cores involve seeing how close the core is the critical point
by arranging what are called "reflectors" nearby and measuring how
pissed off the core gets. In August of 1945 physicist Harry Daghlian
was performing one such test. He was using tungsten bricks as reflectors;
stacking them up and just making the core angrier and angrier. He was about to
add another brick to really piss it off when he dropped the brick right on the
fucking core. Now remember when I said that you needed to be careful fucking
around with this thing? Yeah, dropping fucking brick on it is
definitely not recommended. The core went fucking apeshit and went supercritical.
Can you imagine being Harry Daghlian right now? What the fuck do you do? You just
dropped a fucking brick on a nuclear core. It's like when you break something in
someone's house when they're out of the room and you're wondering if you should just
fucking like say something or should you just hide it or like what? Daghlian took
the brick off but Rufus was already pretty mad. Daghlian was the only one in
the room and he died twenty-five days later of acute radiation poisoning. To
ensure another incident like this never happened again, a number of advanced
safety protocols were put in place. That number was a zero. Enter physicist Louis
Slotin. Tests now involved the core being placed inside two beryllium hemispheres,
which would act as reflectors. The top hemisphere was manually moved up and
down to gauge the core's reaction. Slotin decided that the best way to perform
this was to just fuckin' jam a screwdriver between the two hemispheres --
no, that isn't a joke; like really, a screwdriver - just a normal screwdriver -
was all that was stopping the core from going super critical!
Now I'm no scientist, but I'm pretty sure that's fucking retarded. Like,
there's a level of common sense here that's just totally absent. Like the
first incident, I can understand that was an accident, okay?
Like he dropped the brick, he didn't mean to do that, he fucked up - it was an
accident! But this screwdriver was part of the plan! This was the protocol for doing
the tests. These nuclear cores are serious business, like how was this just allowed to
happen? How many people looked at this setup and thought, "yeah that looks about
right". Apparently Slotin was known to be a bit of an asshole -
he kept performing the test in front of rooms of people, wearing his trademark
blue jeans and cowboy boots. I can imagine him now, just wiggling the
screwdriver up and down like, "wahey, physics!". People told Slotin to stop fucking doing
that and if he kept doing it they'd be dead within a year. Now what they didn't
know, is that a screwdriver, blue jeans and cowboy boots is actually a winning
combination. Nothing could go wrong. In May of 1946, something went wrong. Slotin was
arsing around, doing the tests in front of a room of people like he usually
did, when his screwdriver slipped a fraction of an inch -- oh, who could have
foreseen that happening? Within an instant, there was a flash of blue light
and the core went supercritical. Slotin quickly flipped the top
hemisphere off, putting an end to the accident. But it was too fucking late; Slotin
was blasted with radiation, the position of his body shielding the others in the
room. Although others were injured by the radiation, Slotin was the only one to be
mortally affected. Slotin would die nine days later of acute radiation poisoning,
and with this; Rufus would become the Demon Core. Thanks to the Demon Core,
hands-on criticality experiments were stopped. One of the survivors designed
remote control machines and TV cameras to perform such experiments with all
personnel at a quarter-mile distance. The Demon Core was planned to be used in a
couple of tests, but these plans all fell through. The Demon Core was later melted
down and recycled for use in other cores.