Half-Life Histories

In 1946, a P-239 plutonium core scheduled for detonation-by-nuclear-bomb was harmlessly melted down and reintegrated into the United States’ nuclear stockpile. That was the end of a 14-pound metallic sphere that had killed two scientists not 11 months before. This is the true story of the Demon Core.

By the fall of 1986, the emergency crews fighting to contain the nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant made it into the basement. They turned a corner into a steam corridor beneath failed reactor Number 4 and found not steam, but black lava that had oozed out of the core, eaten through meters of concrete, and settled on the floor. The largest and most famous formation in the corridor was a two-ton wrinkled mass that their radiation sensors firmly told them not to approach. With cameras pushed in from around a corner, the workers documented the dimly lit mass. This is the true story of the Elephant’s Foot.

At the time, it was the most powerful artificial explosion in human history…but it wasn’t supposed to be. On March 1st, 1954, the United States detonated the country’s first thermonuclear or fusion bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, a small coral reef and 23 islands almost equidistant from Australia, Japan, and Hawaii. In the days and weeks following the blast, the United States would pay out millions of dollars in settlements, thousands of islanders would be evacuated and re-evacuated, and the Japanese public would deem the test “a second Hiroshima,” a comparison no citizen would dare make lightly.