See tickle the dragon's tail on Wiktionary
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Maybe I was a little old for it, but that's what I was doing there in the Moran III jungle. I got the shield off my cigarette lighter and jerked out the dinky little damper rods for the pile and started easing the two little bricks toward each other with the point of my lead pencil", "type": "quote" }, { "ref": "1993, James Erwin Schevill, 5 Plays 5, page 52:", "text": "PHYSICIST SLOTIN (manipulating the two hemispheres of the bomb at a table): Come closer. Watch me tickle the Dragon's tail", "type": "quote" }, { "ref": "1995, George Robert Caron, Charlotte E. Meares, Fire of a Thousand Suns: The George R. \"Bob\" Caron Story, page 219:", "text": "And so it happened that Japan and the United States had also tickled the dragon's tail. The two subcritical masses called pride and cultural misunderstanding had been shoved together into one critical mass.", "type": "quote" }, { "ref": "2003, Jonathan P. Binstock, Jim Sanborn, Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction, page 13:", "text": "Were this assembly functional, a person might manipulate the bricks of the radiant castlelike structure to slow down the neutrons, to \"tickle the dragon's tail,\" as Morland writes", "type": "quote" } ], "glosses": [ "To bring two subcritical masses close together in order to find the edge of criticality." ], "id": "en-tickle_the_dragon's_tail-en-verb-YcVhewwh", "links": [ [ "nuclear physics", "nuclear physics" ], [ "subcritical", "subcritical" ], [ "mass", "mass" ], [ "close together", "close together" ], [ "find", "find" ], [ "edge", "edge" ], [ "criticality", "criticality" ] ], "qualifier": "nuclear physics", "raw_glosses": [ "(nuclear physics) To bring two subcritical masses close together in order to find the edge of criticality." ], "related": [ { "_dis1": "12 17 71", "word": "criticality accident" } ] } ], "sounds": [ { "audio": "En-au-tickle the dragon's tail.ogg", "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/b/b1/En-au-tickle_the_dragon%27s_tail.ogg/En-au-tickle_the_dragon%27s_tail.ogg.mp3", "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/En-au-tickle_the_dragon%27s_tail.ogg" } ], "wikipedia": [ "Los Alamos National Laboratory", "Louis Slotin" ], "word": "tickle the dragon's tail" }
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