Word: doomsday
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Herman Kahn's ponderous shocker, On Thermonuclear War, frequently mentions a weapon whose purpose is to end all human life: the Doomsday Machine. Kahn discusses its political uses as calmly as if it were a bug killer, but he gives few technical details. In the latest Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Physicist W. H. Clark spells out some little-known facts about Doomsday Machines-and some of the more refined horrors that nuclear war could bring. Both the U.S. and Russia already can build near-Doomsday bombs, but far more disturbing is the fact that they are sufficiently inexpensive...
...megaton, so that the price tag on a 100-megaton bomb is roughly $1,500,000. A 1,000-megaton bomb would cost $6,000,000. Once they acquired enough fission material, many middle-sized countries could fashion even bigger bombs and, by using certain techniques, produce near-Doomsday destruction and death by exploding comparatively few of them...
...better Doomsday effect, large bombs could be made as radioactive as possible. One way is to "salt" them with sodium, which becomes intensely radioactive when it absorbs neutrons. Clark figures that a 20,000-megaton bomb of this kind would contaminate 200,000 square miles (four times the area of New York State) so heavily that even people in basement shelters would surely die. But since the half life of radioactive sodium 24 is only 15 hours, the bomb's products would lose much of their punch before the wind could carry them around the earth. Thus, a sodium...
Despite the massive destructive potential of these bombs, Clark believes that not even such a Doomsday Machine-should any nation ever be suicidal enough to use one-would completely wipe out human life. In deep caves or far-underground shelters, enough people might find refuge to wait out the radioactivity and emerge to begin again. Concludes Physicist Clark: "The indications are that the human race will survive the H-bomb, though it will be a close thing. Until some more efficient process is discovered, extermination will require a major effort by one or both of the great powers. Lesser states...
...year lease on a suite in a downtown building. But Luken was confident that his dissidents would remain in dissent. Said he: "Jimmy Hoffa is not ten feet tall. I think he's about five foot three.* Hoffa can send in his pros from here till doomsday and he won't get anywhere...