The Real Haunted Story Of Demon Core
The demonstration began on the afternoon of May 21, 1946, at a secret laboratory in a canyon three miles from Los Alamos, New Mexico, the atom bomb's birthplace. Canadian scientist Louis Slotin was teaching his colleagues how to “tickling the dragon’s tail”—bringing the exposed core of a nuclear weapon to criticality. The core, lying alone on a low table, was a dull metal hemisphere with a plutonium nub in the middle, warm to the touch due to radiation. After the bombing of Nagasaki, it was quickly shaped to attack Japan again, but it was later repurposed. Slotin was likely the world's leading plutonium handler at the time. He helped manufacture the first atomic bomb a year earlier, and a contemporaneous picture shows him calmly standing near its parts with his shirt undone and sunglasses on. Back then, bombs were handcrafted.
