His nickname was Rufus, and it consisted of a plutonium core, similar to the one used in the Fat Man bomb, which detonated over Nagasaki. Rufus never

“The core of the devil”: what the third atomic bomb that the US was preparing to drop on Japan was like (and the two fatal accidents it caused)

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2021-08-10 02:00:09

His nickname was Rufus, and it consisted of a plutonium core, similar to the one used in the Fat Man bomb, which detonated over Nagasaki.

Rufus never became a functional bomb, but he did cause two fatal accidents, so he went down in history as “the core of the devil”.

“It was essentially the same as the nucleus of Fat Man,” Alex Wellerstein, a historian specialist in nuclear weapons and author of the blog, tells BBC Mundo. Nuclear Secrecy.

According to official US communications cited in an article by Wellerstein, a bomb made from Rufus should have been ready to be dropped as of August 17 or 18, 1945.

In the early days of August 1945, it was unclear whether two atomic bombs would be enough to subdue Japan, Wellerstein explains.

Only after his surrender on August 15 “was it clear that two bombs had been ‘enough’, if not too“, says the expert.

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