The Demon Core: One Plutonium Sphere That Killed Hundreds of Thousands

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]Did you know that a single sphere of plutonium killed two scientists and hundreds of thousands of others? At Los Alamos in 1945, scientists had a deadly hobby. They called it tickling the dragon's tail. They would use screwdrivers to hold neutron reflecting shells just millimeters away from a plutonium core. One slip meant instant death. Harry Daghlian was the first victim. He accidentally dropped a tungsten brick onto the core. The radiation dose was massive, lethal, instant. Louis Slotin died the next year. During a demonstration, his screwdriver slipped. A blue flash filled the room. Nuclear criticality. Both men suffered horrific deaths. Weeks of agony as radiation destroyed their cells from the inside out. But the demon core wasn't finished killing. That same sphere of plutonium was loaded into Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. One piece of metal responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. The experiments revealed something terrifying about the atomic cage. The line between scientific curiosity and mass destruction is thinner than a screwdriver blade.

[00:01:06]Sometimes human recklessness is the most dangerous force on Earth.