Word: doomsdayers
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During this pre-Doomsday chaos Peter Sellers, as Strangelove, converts an ingenious farce into a great social commentary. Playing his usual three roles, Sellers competently portrays an RAF Captain and President Muffley. But his Strangelove surpasses anything he has ever done. The doctor, a nuclear specialist and a former Nazi, sits silently in his wheelchair through eighty minutes of tension in the War Room. Then, five minutes before the world and the movie end, Strangelove bursts into sadistic glee. He spits out macabre suggestions for preserving human life in mine shafts, smiles hideously behind his dark glasses, clicks his teeth...
...even with dark glasses, never really saw it. General Francis Farrell, one of the military supervisors, told of his feelings: "Thirty seconds after the explosion came, first, the air blast pressing hard against the people, followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty." Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the creation of this weapon at the Los Alamos lab, was reminded of a passage from the Hindus' sacred Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance...
...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...