Word: fissionability
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Around noon on Monday, Indian soldiers descend on villages just a few miles from the desert test range and order the pacifist Bishnoi herdsmen, who refuse to kill animals or cut down trees, to evacuate. At precisely 3:45 p.m., three devices explode in five seconds: a normal fission bomb, a low-yield bomb for tactical battlefield use and something like a hydrogen bomb, which U.S. officials later insist could have been only a less powerful "boosted" weapon using tritium fuses to amplify the fission chain reaction. Altogether they unleash around 80 kilotons of atomic power, six times as powerful...
...century has also learned to recognize evil in the violent eruptions of nonentities: an absolutely insignificant man bursts out of the rented room into sudden, violent, gaudy, world prominence. Tiny cause, titanic effect--this is the social equivalent of splitting the atom. When Nonentity massacres Innocence, an especially horrible fission occurs...
With the discovery of fission," C.P. Snow once wrote, "physicists became, almost overnight, the most important military resource a nation-state could call upon." The unleashing of the awesome destructive power of the atom turned physicists into politicians and politicians into physicists. Scientists were forced to reckon with the repercussions of what they had wrought, while political and military leaders had to comprehend the power they held at their fingertips. In Richard Rhodes' epic and fascinating Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (Simon & Schuster; 731 pages; $32.50), a sequel to his Pulitzer prizewinning The Making of the Atomic...
While the U.S. or Russia could make a miniaturized bomb with as little as 6 lbs. of bomb-grade plutonium-239, a beginner could hope to produce only a much larger, cruder device from his 18 lbs. The fissionable metal for a bomb core has to be melted down and fashioned into a virtually perfect sphere about the size of a tennis ball -- called a pit -- a tricky process that takes a well- equipped nuclear laboratory. To make the bomb reach critical mass and set off a chain reaction -- nuclear fission -- you have to make the sphere implode...
Nuclear weapons in the hands of extremists willing to use them would produce terrorism of a wholly new magnitude. The central logic of terrorism is to maximize horror and shock, producing a blaze of publicity and attention for the cause it represents. By that measure, the crudest of fission bombs set off in a modern city, vaporizing entire blocks, would make the crimes of Carlos and his ilk rank as little more than pinpricks...