Word: gamma
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Radio Giveaway. Another detecting method is by means of radio waves caused by the gamma rays from a nuclear explosion above the surface of the earth or sea. Radio waves from a one-kiloton test can be detected 4,000 miles away under favorable Circumstances, and can locate within 20 miles an explosion 600 miles away...
...week the Walter Reed Army Medical Center at Bethesda. Md. unveiled one of the nation's two "whole-body counting facilities." The patient, on a hammock sling, is slid into the machine like a French loaf into an oven, and dials immediately register how much radioactive material (emitting gamma rays,) he has absorbed...
...known precisely. The nuclear fireball expands very fast at first, but both its temperature and pressure fall as it gets bigger. When its pressure equals that of the air, the ball stops expanding (for a megaton explosion, at a diameter of about one mile). The air also absorbs gamma and ultraviolet rays, confines radioactive particles to a comparatively small cloud...
...space, a nuclear explosion will behave very differently. Its gamma rays will not be absorbed; traveling at the speed of light, they may do damage to humans and to delicate electrical apparatus-including missiles-miles away. Just behind them will come fast-expanding concentric shells of radioactive beta particles (electrons), alpha particles (charged helium nuclei) and neutrons. Bringing up the rear will be the hot gases of the ball of fire, which will expand indefinitely. Some of the residue of an explosion above the atmosphere will presumably shoot out of the solar system. But the amount of lethal fallout...
...high price. The engine itself, which must be cooled elaborately by the liquid hydrogen, will be about as complicated as a conventional chemical engine (see diagram). Its controls will be even more complicated, and all its delicate parts will have to perform perfectly in spite of intense gamma rays striking through them at takeoff...