The “Demon Core” incidents

Separate criticality incidents on August 21, 1945 and May 21, 1946 involving the “Demon Core” (a.k.a. “Rufus”) are claimed to have killed physicists Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin. The Demon Core was to have been the plutonium pit of a third bomb to be dropped on Tokyo, Japan, had Japan not surrendered after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The core was “tuned” to a so-called “reactivity” of ‑0.05 on a scale of fictitious “money” where 0 was the value of “delayed criticality” and 1 was the value of “prompt criticality.” It was probably too sensitive as such for practical use in a bomb, which would have required the use of conventional explosives to compress the core all the way through that range from delayed to prompt criticality before the reactions of delayed criticality would have time to take place.

The slightly subcritical mass was said to be tickling the dragon’s tail, as if perhaps China would have become involved in the war if the Chinese had deemed the punishment of Japan to be excessive.

How bricks, a screwdriver, and a ‘demon core’ of radioactive material killed 2 Manhattan Project scientists

WWII-era experiments on a hunk of plutonium known as the “demon core” left two Manhattan Project physicists dead.

Business InsiderGrace Eliza Goodwin

Little details in the story that cannot be explained away

• The survival of close bystanders for decades to live out their natural lives, including the bored security guard standing right there apparently unhurt;
• The peculiar emphasis on the military rank of “Private” of some of them without any other designation ⸺ Fresh recruits without basic training at a nuclear facility?
• The lack of fire and damage to the building itself from the radiation of such claimed lethal intensity;
• The horrible burns on Slotin’s hand appearing only some days later and not at the time of alleged exposure;
• The fact that nuclear physicists working on a top-secret project would visit communist party physicians for their personal health, when those communist public health physicians were of the communist hive mind that nuclear weapons were a global sickness from which all of humanity would have to be cured, and that they owed no particular duty of care toward individual patients other than that to humanity in general inherent in their communist political aspirations.

If you were a star physicist on the top-secret Manhattan Project, you would probably have been hired because of your expertise in physics, not because of your skills in espionage, tradecraft and statecraft, although your loyalty and trust would have been expected in that regard.

So you would have been under supervision on that job as a protégé or “consumer” from the perspective of the Secret Service, or the CIA which was then just at the point of being founded or officially acknowledged. That is the same cover-your-ass and hold-your-nose attitude of public servants toward public health, emergency services, mandatory vaccinations and endemic medical malpractice which has continued to the present day in the United States as well as in fact particularly in Japan.