Tickling the Tiger's Tail

Those gibbon teenagers can be just so annoying!


This is reminiscent of what Canadian Los Alamos physicist Louis Slotkin  called "tickling the demon's tail", which involved pushing neutron reflectors closer and closer to a (barely) subcritical mass of plutonium. He slipped and succumbed from a burst of gamma radiation.  Wrenching it asunder with his bare hands, it took over a week for him to die.  He called this experiment "tickling the demon's tail."  A sphere just this size destroyed Nagasaki.  The Demon Core was being shipped out to Tinian for Bomb #4 when the Japanese surrendered.

A re-creation of the experiment involved in the 1945 incident. The sphere of plutonium is surrounded by neutron-reflecting tungsten carbide blocks.

The demon core was a 6.2-kilogram (14 lb), 89-millimetre-diameter (3.5 in) subcritical mass of plutonium