Thanks for watching! Protect your browsing with Guardio, plus get an extra discount with free 7 day free trial ⇨ guard.io/thoughty2 (Sponsored)

The sudden recovery is called the surge. It happens to a lot of people before death. It can last for an hour or years and is absolutely terrifying. Imagine thinking you got well when in reality it's the last of your life force burning out

Basically, after the blast of radiation destroyed his chromosomes, his body didn’t have a blueprint to build new cells from and so as his old cells would die, no new cells would replace them. So… he was practically already dead at that point in time, slowly decaying. What an awful way to go.

I served with a fellow RN seaman in a Portsmouth shore base. He was permanently shore based because he needed a full body transfusion every two weeks. He had leukaemia. He had spent 18 months at Christmas Island in the Pacific. It was here that Britain developed its own nuclear deterrent. Very little was known about nuclear radiation’s effects on the human body in those days. The poor guy was a walking ghost and I felt that he was being hidden away so that no questions would be asked. This is true. He had come to the notice of one of the major newspapers and they had tried to contact him for an interview. He was threatened by the authorities and told that his income and support would stop if they managed to contact him. I was drafted away shortly after and I often think about him. I don’t think he survived very long after.

The screwdriver that Slotin used was actually a common practice in criticality experiments (as far as the Toronto Science Centre was concerned) and the reason for his accident was that the spacers used on the other side weren't tungsten or berylium, but instead a tin alloy that melted, causing the top hemisphere to slip and slam shut. Slotin was reported to have ripped the halves opened by hand, and took the radiation across his stomach, suffering immediate burns, and his coffin was lined with lead, and his family ordered to never open it.

It might have been the first experiment, but I heard that when it went supercritical, everybody nearby ran away and the scientist yelled at them to come back and mark where they were standing so they can calculate basically their odds of survival

I've learned that regardless of topic, thoughty2 never fails to satisfy my undying curiosity, no matter how random the content, or my curiosity

The animation at the start with the mustache dude and the anti-mustache guy with a raygun had me rolling😭🤣 Epic message through that little detail on the t-shirt

Have to admit, I do like your content. This no sugar-coating the truth is so refreshing. A bit overdue, but fully subscribed.

My father's first job as an engineer was at the Los Alamos Lab back in around 1952. White Sands was the testing area. He and his colleagues were rounded up to survey the epicenter of a nuclear detonation. I have no idea how 'fresh' this blast was, but every one of them died of cancer. He was one of the last of the group to succumb in 1986 with Multiple Myeloma [correction, thanks to user, abrox] (bone cancer). I have no idea if he was 'shadowed' by the government keeping tabs on his health. I doubt it. Needless to say, safety or even an understanding was not the Lab's highest priority.

Remember the laboratory works we had to do when I studied physics. Before doing those in nuclear physics, where we handled the very tiniest amount of radioactive material, we got a long list of MUST NOTs and MUST DOs and I have a faint memory the we even to sign them. One such experiment involved neutrons and we picked up a microscopic amount of a neutron radiating material in the basement, carried it at the end of the feet stick to 3rd floor and our lab room. Our teachers often stressed that there probable weren’t any “safe levels”. And was stressed over and over again was to NEVER loose respect, be arrogant (“no one has died of a little radiation ….”) and start cutting corners. Watching videos on aircraft accidents I often hear that security instructions are written in blood. So true.

Radiation sickness would be THE worst way to go. Melting from the inside out.. nails falling off. Bleeding from the eyes and ears and mouth.. other than being tortured to death by a kidnapper, radiation sickness would be the worst way to go. It's terrifying to think about.

One might think the idea would occur to the scientists to make the Beryllium hemisphere too short, such that it physically could NOT close the gap all the way, instead of just using the full hemispheres and telling each other, "Hey, make sure you don't ever assemble them without a gap." I mean, they obviously knew by then that no gap = catastrophe. And if you have the capability to machine a full hemisphere, you certainly have the capability to machine another quarter inch off of it.

I was in Los Alamos for an internship in 2014. I used to work at LANSCE (where they have the neutron acceleration facility). I wasn't working with anything radioactive though. Anyway. There's a bridge that connects the Los Alamos national lab with the city area. Under this bridge, there's a road that goes down the canyon. I was one day hiking and decided to go down the bridge and go down that road. As soon as I passed under the bridge I saw one of those yellow radiation signs. Needless to say I turned around and went home. I asked my mentor about it. He said there was a facility down the road, called iced house. It turns out, the iced house is also the omega site, where the critical accident with the demon core happened for the first time, killing Daghlian. I'm glad I turned around. I don't think I would be able to go anywhere near it though, even if I wanted. It's probably a restricted area and most certainly fenced. My point is, anywhere you go in Los Alamos, every place blooms with history. It's crazy. I miss Los Alamos!

Once again you tell me a story I've heard and did it better. You really are a master story teller and I look forward to the next one.

Thank you for your gentle concern of the effects of your investigations may cause.

Got to learn alot, i did not think it was so simple to make radioactive core to go super critical, also got better understanding of the control rods in nuclear reactor.

Interestingly, a lot of what we know about radiation poisoning comes from Slotin's journals. Before leaving the lab, he took careful measurements of where each scientist was standing in ralation to the core, worked out the relative radiation dosage each would have received, and started a journal of his own decline. He continued to work with doctors even knowing he was dying, because he knew the research would be used to save others.

Nuclear radiation is such a scary subject, always love the stories you find and how you tell them!

Another fascinating video, Arran! It's always a pleasure.

Very, very well put together, Thoughty2!!

"It's kind of terrifying to think what must have been going through Slotin's head in those frantic seconds..." Yeah, about 20,000 REM of ionizing gamma and neutron radiation.

FYI, getting blasted by a wave of radiation that strong would actually be the equivalent of deleting the main files from your dna. Since your dna can no longer multiply, you simply live until the remaining cells die off. It’s a brutal process, where the worst it’s ever gotten is a point of a man being forced to live until the entirety of his body was degloved from the skin dying and where his organs were hanging out in patches that had rotted away. The hospital deemed it a “rare experiment” but was obviously shut down afterwards. Edit: He wasn’t a test, his family wanted him alive so the doctors decided to also use him as a research study since he was a very rare chance.

John Cusack played Louis Slaton in the movie The Fatman And The Little Boy, though from what I remember the timeline was moved up to before first atomic bomb test. In the movie, following the accident he ordered everyone to mark where they were and leave. He then calculated how much radiation each person received based on where they were standing and concluded that he was the only one in danger. I don't know if Slotin did that in real life, but it was a great scene.

Absolutely fascinating! Thank you!

Literally the closest thing we had to some kind of eldritch horror. It seems like just a ball of metal, but how many things on earth can kill you simply by existing in the same room as it for too long.

The criticality experiments didn't deal with critical mass they dealt with reflecting enough neutrons (Neutron flux) to maintain a near-critical state. Critical mass is achieved inside the nuclear device by the means of conventional explosives. When the explosives detonate they compress the core into a critical mass after which the core promptly goes critical and explodes. The difference is the experiments were designed to ease up to criticality but when the reflector was removed the neutron flux dissipated and the reaction stopped (mostly). In a critical mass nothing can stop the reaction and it happens much faster, hence the explosion. Going critical doesn't necessarily mean an explosion however a critical mass will always result in an explosion. What happens in a nuclear explosion is called going "prompt critical" and is where the entire fissile mass goes critical almost instantly. Reflecting neutrons back at a core is more akin to what happens in a nuclear reactor where the criticality is metered. A core can only go prompt critical once it reaches a critical mass and in order to reach critical mass the core must be compressed by the conventional explosives.

I get chills every time he says "bover" or "furver." It's like a kid that says "fwog." I understand it's just the accent but I can't help it.

Very well presented, spellbinding. Thank you.

It's just crazy that they didn't just design spacers or a vent of sorts into the beryllium sphere after knowing what happens if the two sides meet.

Out of all topics related to nuclear and atomic disasters, both the Elephants Foot and the Demon Core remain my favorite subjects to learn about. I don't know why, cuz both are terrifying, but they're just so interesting to me! I guess it's cuz they show a more intimate look at the colossal danger of radiation, and how easily this energy can get out of control.

Most dangerous object ever created Me: farts into a balloon and leaves it in the staff room THEY AINT SEEN NOTHING YET

I love this fellows presentation and delivery.

As soon as he said “old habits die hard” I immediately liked this video, quality knowledge and goofy jokes… well done mister, love the channel 👍🏼

Slotin's internal radiation burns were described as being like "three-dimensional sunburn". He really did die an unimaginably horrible painful death.

Thanks for the excellent information!

I was well aware of these stories, but you presented them very well. Thank you.

Slotin saved his colleagues and recorded invaluable data by immediately noting who stood where, and how far they were from the reaction. That, plus his quick reaction, was absolutely heroic, and goes to demonstrate absolute calm in tragedy.

"If you flew over that smoke I promise you tomorrow you'll be begging for that bullet" a quote by Valery Legasov in the series Chernobyl. I wonder if the victims of the demon core thought of the same thing.

Bloody fascinating! Thank you.

Earlier in WWII, there was also the fire bombing of Tokyo, claiming 120,000 lives in one night, yet the War Council, and Emperor of Japan were still embodied to fight on. So, we needed something drastic to convince the War Council and Emperor that we would fight until we bombed their land into the ocean. At that time, the Atom Bombs were needed, no matter what you think of them now.

It's so terrifying how relaxed we treated safety measures around radiation in the early days. It's equally terrifying that high doses literally rip apart your DNA so after a bit of time, your bone marrow cannot successfully copy your DNA since it's now broken up.. you slowly have body parts sluff apart, until you eventually can't even get a I.V. drip to maintain in a vein to help alleviate any pain or effects of the radiation sickness.. only most severe concentrated doses can effect the human body in such horrific ways... I really wish they thought out greater levels of safety measures around this type of science as they were beginning to learn about it's powers and effects if aimed in the wrong direction.. in the right direction it's the most helpful stuff we've so far discovered, but we must treat it with respect, thankfully science and technology has advanced so far sense those early sorta radioactive prehistoric era days.. for the sake of our climate I hope we heal our wounds from this era and transcend into a new age of resurgence of nuclear power to help us combat carbon emissions, green house gases and climate change and instead transition to a new age of much more advanced, safer, nuclear Energy. It's something we definitely should include in our life's. Its just very tough we had to go through such a harsh learning phase that also sadly synced up with war time but nuclear power can exist solely on its own for only a positive impact on our energy grid and advanced source of energy transmission. Especially in this modern day of advanced technology and understanding of the hazards and how to approach them so we are most unlikely to encounter those hazards. I strongly believe in the future of nuclear energy and it saving us from climate change.

Important note: a nuclear reactor is actually at Critical Mass whenever it is _on._ Runaway disasters like Chernobyl happen at much further stages down the line.

You really come up with the best videos I see here

You are the most articulated and easiest to listen to scientists that I have seen thus far. Thanks for All the stories 🙏

The 1955 classic film-noir movie, "Kiss me Deadly", had people killing for a mysterious briefcase. It is finally revealed that what was inside was the demon core. In the end, the suitcase is opened and a blinding light comes out that incinerates the person and burns down the house. "Pulp Fiction" had its version of the briefcase but Tarantino never bothered to say what it was.

When a few people die it’s a tragedy but when thousands die it’s a statistic

And btw, you and Kyle Hill nailed this issue on your channels. Congratulations for this awesome documentary!

rly good vid dude im in for more, subscribed ;)

I think you made a pretty serious misstep on the murder level of the a-bombs being the worst. The rape of Nanking was insane, Pol Pots ethic cleanse, the Burmese civil war and the final solution all come to mind. Granted the nukes were more spectacular but I think that the intent behind the above events and the end body counts make the bombs dropped look tiny. That said the demon core and the story behind it is quite incredible and extremely interesting 🙂

I worked at a retirement home and I had the privilege of meeting a resident who lived there that was the safety director brought on after the demon core killed the person who touched it with a screwdriver. As an aspiring theoretical physicist, it was amazing to talk to him about his experience at los alamos

Im from pecos valley new mexico my parents, my neighbors all suffered fallout, but no studied it or even cared. We had high cancer rates, but it was never studied

Qxir has a great episode out on this with all the cursing an Irishman has to offer. He's our Gaelic you tuber 😂

I knew the story of the demon core (most physicists do) but you told it very well. Good idea to leave out Slotin's death--those 9 days were horrific. ✌️

Thank you for consistently uploading top-tier high quality and interesting content!

My dad was there at Bikini Atoll when this thing went off . If I remember right he was ether 17 or 27 miles out . I think he said 27 miles . He was on the bridge . He was the signal man for the day . He told me that he could feel the heat from where he was at . He is still alive at 94 . I always remember him blinking all the time . About 4 years ago the VA discovered a chip of paint inbreeded into his eye . The paint chip turned out to be radio active . It just amazed me even at that distance of 27 miles a vary small chip could travel that fare and impale it self into the eyeball . But it did . I have not seen my dad ever sense I left home at the age of 13 . He was a drunk a whore monger and was mean . He hated me the worst from the other of my siblings . I still carry the scars that he put on me . I know this is not about me or my dad but about how much energy this puts out .

_"Well, that does it."_ You have to love and admire that kind of intellectual honesty to come to terms with your demise in the moment.

As an aside; the Japanese/American artist Masami Teraoka was a young boy living several miles outside Hiroshima. He was walking to school on the morning the bomb exploded and has said it looked like the sun was rising in two opposite directions.

One of the most horrendous cases of radiation illness/death has to be that of Hisashi Ouchi, I think. What he suffered, is truly heartbreaking. 💔

I was in a computer programming course in college with the grandson of one of the guys who was part of the Manhattan project. This kid was as poor at programming as I was, and he said that his grandfather helped him on some of his math papers, but he was told to leave his math paper on the table and leave the room. When he came back, his grandfather would have filled in the answers. I thought to myself that this really intelligent old guy must lament that his grandson couldn't do even a shadow of the math he had to do at the same age. I always wondered what happened to that kid, because sure as heck neither of us could program in Basic.

I got to meet the last surviving scientist on the Manhattan Project. He was a truly remarkable person. Rip, Mr. Bert Tolbert.

That was well presented and thrilling. Thanks for the education and sharing this history.

Enrico Fermi, who was dismayed to see Slotin get rid of the shims between the beryllium spheres, and use a screwdriver instead, had warned him that he'd be dead within a year if he kept doing that experiment that way he did. Slotin kept doing it anyway, and Fermi's warning proved literally prophetic.

Sloutin was mindful enough to yell at everyone to stand still as he marked on the floor where they stood with chalk, so as to help in determining their absorption.

When I was a kid I went on a school field trip to a museum. They had 3 panels from a concrete wall that appeared to show the shadows of 2 kids and a man walking. The tour guide explained that the shadows were from people hit by radiation from the nuclear blast and they absorbed the radiation before it hit the wall. As a kid with no concept of death yet it was as fascinating as the dinosaur skeletons we had passed earlier in the tour. But looking back on it as an adult that is well versed in the battles of WWII, it’s frightening to think that I can be disintegrated in the blink of an eye while simply crossing the street. Even Darth Vader isn’t a fan of disintegrations, so it’s definitely a bad way to go.

I read that immediately after separating the beryllium hemispheres, realizing what had happened, he told everyone in the room to "freeze", and then, demonstrating the ultimate sang-froid, measured the distance they were from the burst to calculate their mortality based on the dosage they got from where they were standing. Geez ...

I have heard a lot about The Demon Core but as always it's good to hear your take on it.

Demon Core sounds like an RPG item that constantly drains HP in exchange for power or something like that.

9:05 amazing instruments could detect all that. Incredible that even with all those reflective bricks enough radiation still escaped to kill them. WOW. Such a quick short small amount so deadly

A slight correction - Both Alvin Graves and Dwight Young who were present alongside Slotin, experienced ARS.

I'm sure in 1985 plutonium is available in every corner drugstore. But in 1955 it's a little hard to come by!

My Grandmother was in Nagasaki when Fatman was dropped. She is 93 and suffered no noticeable damage. A friend of hers was about a mile away from where my Grandmother was and was infertile and suffered multiple forms of cancer before dying in her 60's. My Grandmother was of a poorer class and her diet was loaded with iodine from Fish and seaweed, which may have helped.

Thank you. Very interesting.

I just watched a video by Kyle Hill about the Demon Core and he stated that after talking with a scientist at Chernobyl about it, he got the impression that the Demon Core might still be out there somewhere. He could easily have been joking, but it's still an interesting thought that such a thing wasn't actually melted down.

Have you done a video on the guy who was shot through the head with aparticle accelerator? Dude got an insane dose of radiation and somehow is still alive but he was also screwed hard as a radiation survivor that wasn't in a nuclear accident making his treatment difficult.

Your's is some of the best most polished and professional content on this platform. This was an incredible story, the delivery was perfect, as usual :) I hope you're well Thoughty.

"It'll never happen to me." That's exactly the explanation of those events. I don't know whether it's best called stupidity or arrogance or both, but there are a lot of people walking around in every generation that feel exactly that same way. For most of us we just get a nasty cut or something like that that will heal, but evidently the stakes getting higher doesn't defuse the attitude.

5 & 1/4 mill subs!?!?!?! THATS FREAKING AWESOME THOUGHTY!!!!!

One would have thought that small feet would have been added to the beryllium lid to automatically create a space, thereby eliminating clumsy spacers or screwdrivers.

I've heard this story before, but Thoughty2 has a gift for telling stories.

This incident is shown in the movie Fat man and Little Boy. Also.. just a side note.. While the death toll from the two A Bombs is horrific.. Far more lives were saved by there use. An invasion of Japan was estimated to cost 1 Million American lives.. and based on the numbers from other battles in the pacific.. at least 2-3 times that many Japanese. Also.. more than a million were killed in Tokyo using conventional incendiary bombs.

I can think of a long list of worst acts of violence in human history

Hi, I'm familiar with these stories from books about the Manhattan Project. Yet just as you noted, it was the horror of how they must have felt upon realising that they would be dead soon, but for a small seemingly insignificant movement of their hands. The first fellow was also noted for his foolhardiness in particular. At one stage a problem happened inside a nuclear pile, and he stripped off his clothes and dived into the cooling water and repaired the fault.

Another sleepless night, watching Thoughty2 be smart and quirky at 5am. The one good thing about insomnia is I can always find something interesting on this channel. :)

Seeing their incompetence in handling radioactive materials, I half expected one of these scientists to have gotten hold of three demon cores and start juggling! The "special effects" would have been wild!

Excellent job!

here before he changes the title, the first title is: "How This Bomb Killed People Without Exploding"

Very brave, not to insta suicide after getting a lethal dose of radiation. I mean, the second guy who made a mistake knew exactly, how terrible he would die and yet he chose to suffer a few days before he went rip.

My Dad recently sold the family piano, one that floated around Los Alamos and is rumored to have had Enrico Fermi often play on it in his off time while Oppenheimer leaned up against it having drinks. As a kid, I never ran across any unused and disposed of explosives in the canyons, but my friends and I would play down there all the time. We glow in the dark.

Correction: he said, around 16;00, that no one aside from Louis Slotin got radiation sickness. The guy 2nd closest to the Demon Core got a high but not lethal dose of radiation; he certainly got radiation sickness but survived.

People are saying great video and never disappoints and the video just came out like 1 minutes ago LMAO

I am highly addicted to your content. Thanks for putting together some of the best educational content on YT, and making it entertaining to boot!

Love the diversity of the 1946 Los Alamos lab.

We visited the museum dedicated to this stuff in New Mexico, scary stuff

Fission of 1kg of uranium = burning 4,000,000,000kg of coal … I had to let that one sink in for a minute. Me thinks we long ago should have put ALL our scientific effort into becoming Master Ticklers of that goddamn dragon’s tail. No??

What a time to get recommended this video

Radiation sickness is terrifying 😭

I’ve heard this story before but that picture of him keeping the spheres apart is something I’d never seen. I can even imagine

Thousands of deaths is a stastic less than 10 is a tragedy. The duality of human kindness.

I love the way you talk. It makes your narration interesting.