Word: fissionable
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Plutonius: "Geigers, beware, for Fission and ourselves will wed our forces to spawn a new and fiercer breed of demons...
...first four decades of the 20th Century, the new physics had developed a kind of unintended secrecy. Walled off from public comprehension by the difficulty of their subject, the physicists battered their way into the heart of matter. Just before World War II they made the critical discovery: the fission of uranium (Otto Hahn, 1939). Whipped on by wartime urgency, theory turned into technology in six racing years...
Means for Suicide. To guess at all is starry-eyed, for atomic energy still means the Abomb, a world of terror, not of promise. Uranium fission is only a beginning. The building-up of hydrogen into helium, if it could be achieved, would theoretically yield vastly more energy-which could also be used for bombs. The quantum theorists, roaming in abstract ecstacy among their lacy equations, long ago entered a world where matter and energy are almost indistinguishable. They talk matter-of-factly of turning all of a sample of matter into energy. A single pound of anything, unfrozen...
...cancer is the use of "radioactive isotopes from the heart of the smashed atom." Now radioactive isotopes have something to do with atomic energy, but by no stretch of the imagination do they reside in the hearts of atoms nor are they released in the process of nuclear fission. There are several other bad errors...
...full, round figure alerted Washington's amateur physicists. According to fairly dependable estimates, the Hiroshima bomb developed not more than 10% of the fission energy present in its nuclear explosive. Perfect efficiency (probably impossible) would therefore give about ten times as much power, certainly not 1,000 times as much. So, figured the amateur physicists, the talkative Senator must have meant a bomb made out of hydrogen. It is well known that the conversion of hydrogen into helium is the nuclear reaction that gives the sun its energy...