Word: fissionable
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...wrong. A premature explosion on earth, or too early an explosion aloft, could contaminate the atmosphere with radioactive products. All tests in the atmosphere, including last week's Soviet test, will surely raise the level of the earth's radioactivity. The dirtiest tests in the past were fission-fusion-fission bombs, the first of which, exploded by the U.S. in 1954, killed a Japanese fisherman by its fallout and seriously injured many people in the nearby Marshall Islands. When the Russians fol lowed with similar dirty tests, radiation increased all over the world. Especially frightening was the fallout...
...battlefield with deadly radioactivity. Such clean weapons are not in hand, and they cannot be developed without many more tests. Even farther away is the much-discussed neutron bomb, which promises to be a small, short-range H-bomb exploded by some other means than the usual "dirty" fission detonator. Its proponents believe that it will kill people by neutrons while its feeble blast and heat will do little damage to property. But before it can be added to the U.S. arsenal, the neutron bomb will require a long and intensive series of tests...
...such pure-fusion (neutron) bombs be built? As Senator Dodd remarked, scientists will not say that the job is impossible (TIME, Feb. 10). But nearly all agree that it is extremely difficult. Since N-bombs cannot have fission detonators and still act like N-bombs, some other detonator must be found that can raise the temperature of the fusion ingredients to some 1,000,000° C. so that they can start to react. So far, no chemical explosive or other nonfission detonator has remotely approached this temperature. Until something comes near this goal, there is little point in demanding...
...have other valuable military uses. Carried aloft by anti-missile missiles, it could do its job without spraying the ground below with radioactive fallout. But perhaps the most devastating effect of the N-bomb would be to make nuclear explosives available to all nations. Plutonium and uranium 235 for fission bombs are expensive and scarce, but fusion ingredients (lithium, deuterium, etc.) are comparatively cheap and plentiful. If they are the only major ingredients needed, the manufacture of N-bombs and big H-bombs to be triggered by them will be an easy matter, once the secret of their construction becomes...
...Plutonium 239 is the isotope used in fission bombs...