Word: bomb
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Manhattan's small Hemisphere Press. Even then there were snags. The Russians balked at the standard U.S. "Act of God" contract clause absolving printers in case of natural catastrophes, such as floods and earthquakes. Snapped a Red editor: "Put in anything you want -earthquakes, fires, even the atom bomb. But leave God out of it." Later, when TV camera crews descended on Hemisphere Press for news program shots, a Red editor groaned: "This competition thing got me all upset. I couldn't understand why two television cameras had to be in our print shop-one from...
...several hundred million people, as the fallout drifted capriciously with the wind, falling on friend and foe alike. If the AEC has achieved a "large nuclear weapon" with greatly reduced fallout, it will enable atomic strategists to lay down their pattern of death with greater precision, make the H-bomb a far more useful military weapon. A bomb exploded, for instance, over a Polish air base would be less likely to depopulate Berlin...
Operational Factors. The AEC did not explain how it controls H-bomb fallout, but it pointed the way to some speculation. Strauss's "operational factors" presumably refer chiefly to the altitude at which the weapons are exploded. The 1954 H-bomb test that made "7,000 square miles of territory ... so contaminated that survival might have depended on prompt evacuation" (according to the AEC's own reports) was exploded on a tower on a small coral island. Its fireball dug a deep crater and tossed millions of tons of pulverized coral into the air. This material, made highly...
...high-yield H-bombs of the current test program were dropped from aircraft and exploded high above the surface. Thus their fireballs did not concentrate their fury on a small area of coral, but spread it over miles of water. As a result, not much pulverized material was carried upward. The total radioactivity produced by such a bomb may be large, but most of the potential fallout is distributed high in the stratosphere in the form of extremely fine particles or even single molecules. Such impalpable stuff is slow to fall. Not much would fall in any one place...
When the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949, many U.S. officials and some scientists expressed public astonishment at Russia's rapid progress in atomic weaponry. The astonishment was based on the general belief that Russia started work on nuclear weapons only after World War II. This is not true, says a recently declassified report by the Rand Corp. of Santa Monica, an outfit which does super-secret long-range research for the Air Force. The Russians started atomic work at about the same time as the U.S., and they were at work during most...