I'm told that in the normal cubic system there are $\frac18$ of an atom at each corner and these atoms' radius are such that $a = 2r$ ($a$ is the lattice constant, $r$ radius of an atom).
In bbc (body centered cubic system) they say the atoms in the diagonals are touching, and as a consequence the atoms at each corner are not big enough to satisfy the above relation $a = 2r$
Why is this? Couldn't it be like the normal cubic system but stick an atom in the center to fill up the remaining space? How do we know that they touch along the cube's diagonal and not along the edges?