Jack and the Demon Core
Jack ReVelle climbed up the steep embankment, the frozen North Carolina dirt
PHOTO / U.S. AIR FORCE
crumbling under his weight and mud clinging
to his boots. He emerged from the hole, his gloved hands cradling a volleyball-size silver sphere known as a pit, or by some as the “Demon Core.” When connected to the right components — as it had been five days earlier before plummeting at 700 mph towards a swampy field — the pit ReVelle carried contained enough plutonium and uranium to trigger an atomic
The story of how alumnus Jack ReVelle helped save America from nuclear disaster
explosion 250 times more powerful than those that ended World War II. The pit ReVelle held was the core of one of two identical bombs a B-52 Stratofortress bomber was carrying when it broke up over the small town of Faro just after midnight on Jan. 24, 1961. “As far as I’m concerned we came damn close to having a Bay of North Carolina,” ReVelle, an OSU alumnus, says more than five decades after the incident. “The nuclear
by Michael Baker
explosion would have completely changed the Eastern seaboard if it had gone off.” (continues)
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