Word: fallout
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...TROPOSPHERIC FALLOUT. In temperate latitudes, most of the dust, and part of the cloud, never gets higher than some 35,000 ft. This collection of nuclear fission products is the tropospheric fallout, and since the troposphere is the part of the earth's atmosphere that contains rain clouds, even its finest particles of radioactive material are likely to be carried back to the ground by falling snowflakes or water droplets...
...most of the fallout from the current Soviet tests has been tropospheric. One of the radioactive air masses from the Russian Arctic test site rose into an air current that carried it from eastern Canada down the U.S. East Coast to Florida. Then it veered westward, along the Gulf Coast, dropping radioactivity that coated local pastures and showed up in the milk of grazing cows. Wandering clouds of tropospheric fallout from the Soviet tests have been detected over most of the Northern Hemisphere. They all crossed Soviet territory, many of them veering south across thickly populated parts of Russia while...
...alarmed because iodine 131 has a short half life* of eight days. When the Russians finish their current test series, most of the accumulated iodine 131-whether in milk, in air or on grass-will vanish in a few weeks. Other short-lived isotopes in the tropospheric fallout will die off also...
...5TRATOSPHERIC FALLOUT. The third kind of fallout-stratospheric-will not disappear so quickly. Bombs of more than a megaton of power send a large part of their ballooning fireballs climbing high into the stratosphere where there are no falling raindrops or snowflakes. In the frigid stable stratosphere, extremely fine particles of radioactive matter from a big bomb may hang suspended for years-and the bigger the bomb, the more of its dangerous fallout goes into the stratosphere...
Inexorable Climb. The stratospheric circulation has its greatest effect in late winter and early spring, and that is when the Public Health Service expects the Soviet strontium 90 and cesium 137 to fall most heavily. Most of the fallout will contaminate the temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere, where the bulk of the world's population lives...