The meme-ification of the "Demon Core"

The strange transformation of a criticality accident into dark Internet humor

On May 21, 1946, the Canadian physicist Louis Slotin was demonstrating to several other Los Alamos scientists how to do a criticality experiment. Slotin wasn’t really doing an experiment at the time, in the sense of taking careful scientific measurements — he was simply showing how one would do them, because he was about to leave the laboratory to be part of the assembly team for the first postwar nuclear weapons test at the Bikini atoll, and they were going to be taking over the experimental work for him while he was gone. In front of him was a beryllium hemisphere (a neutron reflector), with a plutonium weapon core inside of it. In his left hand he held another beryllium hemisphere, with his thumb reaching into a hole in the top, and using a screwdriver as leverage, he carefully lowered the top hemisphere over the core. As he did so, the neutrons exiting the core began to reflect back into it, increasing the overall reactivity of the system.

A recreation of the Slotin accident, in the same room, at the same table, even possibly the same screwdriver. Another plutonium core, in two hemispheres, is also visible on the table.

And then… the screwdriver slipped. The top hemisphere slid over the plutonium, and it tipped just slightly over the edge of prompt criticality, creating a brief but intense nuclear reaction that showered Slotin and those around him with radiation and created a brief flash of blue light in the air around them. In less than a second, Slotin had reflexively knocked the top hemisphere off, and the reaction had stopped, but it was too late: he was walking dead, having absorbed enough radiation to kill him horribly and painfully within nine days.

The story of the so-called “Demon Core,” which was involved in two criticality accidents — the one that killed Slotin, and another, different accident that killed another scientist, Harry Daghlian, a year before — is part of the lore of the atomic age. A fictionalized version of the accidents was featured in the very first Hollywood film about the Manhattan Project (MGM’s The Beginning or the End?, from 1947), as well as in the 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy. And over the years there have been many non-fiction accounts of the accident, with ever more details emerging over time; if you do want more details on the accident, the core, and the aftermath, you might take a look at an article I published on it a few years back, for example.

What really has fascinated me about the Slotin accident in particular, though, is the emergence of an entire ecosystem of “memes” about it. The first one I can remember seeing in this one, in 2019:

You could, at the time, only buy it on a T-shirt from someone on Etsy based out of Japan, but now there are a million knock-off/duplicates available on the Internet. I don’t know who the original author was, but at the time I was pretty amazed at it — it felt like something of a “deep cut,” because you had to recognize the entire Slotin set-up in order to see why this somewhat kawaii rendering of the Slotin experiment, along with the “I love science” phrasing, was a form of dark humor.

I don’t remember seeing “Demon Core” memes prior to the above. I am sure one can find earlier ones — that was just the first one that came across my computer screen. Google Trends has some interesting results on this:

The above is showing the relative search volume of three terms: “Louis Slotin” (red, always very low), “Demon Core” (blue, interesting spikes, and a growing relevancy from 2019 onward), and “NUKEMAP” (yellow, included as something of a “control” — something I consider “somewhat well-known in certain circles” but not “universally well-known”; about 1/4th of my engineering-school freshmen this year had heard of the NUKEMAP before taking any courses with me). My reading of this is that the “Demon Core” was still pretty obscure among non-nuke-nerds until around 2019/2020, when it “broke through” some barrier and is now something that can readily referenced online and you would expect a significant fraction of the readership (esp. geeky boys, I imagine) to recognize.

Since 2019 or so there has been an, er, explosion of “Demon Core”/Slotin experiment memes. The veritable source Know-Your-Meme created a dedicated “Demon Core” page in May 2021, showcasing some of the variety of the meme. Most of the initial ones seem to be of the same sort of kawaii (Japanese for “cute”) model as the one above, transporting it into a context of anime girls, cats, and anime cat girls:

What is going on here? I am not exceptionally well-versed in anime or manga tropes, but I think the “obvious” reading of this is a classic case of “unexpected juxtaposition creates humor.” That is, moving something from one context (“Demon Core,” radiation experiment, horrible death) into another (cute, anime, girls) creates something that feels novel and unusual. One could no doubt analyze many different dimensions of juxtaposition at work here, including the gender roles: Slotin was not just male, but the entire accident was caused by the sort of risk-taking bravado (which had he been explicitly warned about) that anyone who has spent time as or around young men recognizes immediately. So having a cute Japanese schoolgirl performing this very male-coded experiment is quite a switch in tone — and one that probably also is dually resonant with the “geeky boy” demographic that I suspect is largely the primary “receiver” and “transmitter” of the meme.

The Slotin accident has also achieved, in recent years, that “sweet spot” of “if you know, you know” virality: it’s not so well-known that everyone would get it, but it’s also not so obscure that only dedicated wonks or experts would know about it (a reference to the Kelley accident, or the SL-1 accident, would be probably too deep a cut to go viral).

I have not made a full survey or taxonomy of these memes; there are dozens and dozens, if not more. The ones above I would categorize as “entirely new drawings,” in which the Demon Core pictures are used as reference, but the entire style is novel. There also cases where the Demon Core pictures (or self-serious drawings/renderings of the experiment) are added to existing meme formats, such as the “pondering my orb” wizard:

There is also quite a few of the “take a stock photograph of a product and add the Demon Core to it” variety:

And so on — there are an almost unlimited number. There are arguably no tasteful versions of this meme, of course. (XKCD, perhaps, comes closest.) Because it’s a meme derived from human suffering. It’s meant to be in bad taste — that’s the source of the humor.

The medical details of the “Demon Core” accidents are pretty horrible. The photographs of the victims are not something you probably want to see — they are bad. I have described them elsewhere. Suffice to say these were extremely painful deaths, involving a body whose internal cellular processes were breaking down in real time under the influence of billions of tiny cellular cuts, and all the while the poor scientists were being monitored, photographed, and (ultimately) inventoried. Slotin’s hubris and bravado caused his death, but it didn’t mean he deserved that suffering, and it doesn’t mean we can’t feel sorry for him, one human to another. I am not trying to be a scold. We just have to remember that we are not making fun of an abstract idea, here. There was real suffering involved.

And… yet. What is interesting to me about many of the initial memes, especially the anime ones, is that they appear to have originated from Japan. And that adds a wrinkle to the sentiment here.

Godzilla + the “Demon Core” = an interesting fusion of nuclear metaphors…

The “Demon Core” was, as people who know the full story are well-aware, was actually the third plutonium core fabricated, after the one detonated at Trinity and the one detonated over Nagasaki, and would have almost surely been used over a Japanese city had World War II continued for a few more weeks. The plutonium core before it killed some 40,000–70,000 people, mostly Japanese civilians but also Korean laborers and even some Allied Prisoners of War, at Nagasaki. The “Demon Core” killed two American weapons scientists, and at least in Slotin’s case was entirely preventable and due to a lack of proper procedure and respect for the hazards involved.

So perhaps if anybody has a “right” to make jokes in poor taste about the “Demon Core”… it might be the Japanese? Because Americans have made jokes about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki since they occurred. One can’t just attribute it to wartime sentiment. Well after the suffering of the Japanese victims was public knowledge, and after the Japanese became a key American ally, there were still novelty songs about the killing of cities. Even just a few weeks ago, Saturday Night Live featured a joke in particularly bad taste about the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to atomic bomb survivors. I’m not here to be the humor police, or to say things should be “off limits” for comedy, or that it’s “too soon,” or make any other scolding noises. Dark humor, in its own strange and inverted way, is arguably a sort of coping mechanism — a defense against the darkness, a way to tame and de-fang the horrors of the world. The bomb is no stranger to such treatment, of course — consider Dr. Strangelove, or Tom Lehrer — although my sense is that the “Demon Core” memes are not, in any serious way, making conscious “interventions” in how people think about the risks of the nuclear world.