Word: fissioning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Atom bomb tacticians believe that the best place to explode a bomb is high above the target, where blast and heat do the most damage. Since the radioactive fission products of such "air bursts" are carried upward and dissipated harmlessly, civil defense workers, with no deadly contamination to worry about, could go straight at the problems of less subtle death and destruction...
Atomic bombs might be exploded in the air over U.S. cities, under water, or at ground level. Though the effects are different in each case, the principle is the same. At the instant a bomb explodes overhead, fission turns it into a rapidly growing "ball of fire," which dims for an imperceptible instant, then grows to a diameter of 900 feet at a temperature of 7,000° C. (see diagram). Around the fire ball forms a shock wave - a shell of air compressed so tightly that it glows white...
...fission type used to date, as distinct from the fusion or hydrogen bomb, which has not yet been made...
...famous Smyth Report (Atomic Energy for Military Purposes) appears this ominous sentence: "The fission products produced in one day's run of a 100,000-kilowatt chain-reacting pile might be sufficient to make a large area uninhabitable." The Smyth Report appeared in 1945. Since then, "radiological poisons" have hardly been mentioned, much less evaluated publicly as a military weapon...
Curies & Roentgens. Dr. Thirring calculated that each 100 uranium atoms that fission in a pile produce 61 atoms useful as radioactive poisons; i.e., their half-lives are not less than eight days (which would make them become harmless too quickly) or more than a year (which would make them too mild initially...