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Christy pit

Christy pit noun: an early design of pit (core of an implosion-type nuclear weapon), used in the detonation over Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945.

Noun

Christy pit (plural Christy pits)

  1. An early design of pit (core of an implosion-type nuclear weapon), used in the detonation over Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945.
    • The principal insight behind the Christy pit was that a solid, subcritical core of plutonium could be compressed to criticality.
    • Nickname given to the Christy pit because of its association with two fatalities during hands-on Dragon Experiments; it replaced “Rufus,” an earlier nickname. The Christy pit, a solid sphere of plutonium-239, was initially fabricated as two hemispheres of an alloy of plutonium and gallium.2017, Demon core, entry in Benjamin C. Garrett, Historical Dictionary of Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Warfare, Bowman & Littlefield, 2nd Edition, page 90

Forms of Christy pit

pluralChristy pits

Origin of Christy pit

Named after Canadian-American physicist Robert F. Christy, who worked on the Manhattan Project to produce the first nuclear weapons.

Questions about Christy pit

What does Christy pit mean?
Christy pit means an early design of pit (core of an implosion-type nuclear weapon), used in the detonation over Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945.
What part of speech is Christy pit?
Christy pit is a noun.
What is the plural of Christy pit?
The plural of Christy pit is Christy pits.

Words near Christy pit in the dictionary

  1. christs
  2. Christus crucifixus
  3. Christward
  4. Christwards
  5. christy
  6. Christy pit
  7. Christy pits
  8. Christyn
  9. christyoside
  10. Chriswell
  11. Chriswells

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Christy pit (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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