Word: h-bomb
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...specter of Soviet subversion, real and imagined, at home; the threat of nuclear holocaust ominous enough to send schoolchildren diving under their desks at a teacher's practice command. (I remember studying an aerial photo of New York City, on which concentric circles described the effects of an H-bomb blast over the Empire State Building, and feeling a sense of doom that I lived four blocks inside the zone of vaporization...
...stage for his story about the hydrogen bomb, Rhodes deftly recounts the deeds of the perfidious Klaus Fuchs, the German emigre who furnished the Russians with not only a hand-drawn model of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki but also the theoretical plans for making the H-bomb. As scientist Hans Bethe remarked later, Fuchs was "the only physicist I know who truly changed history"--but he changed it by passing on nature's secrets, not discovering them...
...birth of Teller's bomb was an uneasy one. Some scientists, notably Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led Los Alamos during the war, believed that it was inherently immoral, a weapon of genocide, since its lethal footprint (unlike the A-bomb's) could not be confined to a purely military objective. He was convinced that the development of the H-bomb would only escalate the arms race. It was in fact his dedicated opposition to the Super, claims Rhodes, and not his cursory contacts with Soviet agents, that led the Atomic Energy Commission in 1953 to strip Oppenheimer...
...found it easier to get top-secret documentson the H-bomb than it was to getinter-departmental correspondence at Harvard,"says James G. Hershberg '82, author of a recentbiography on former Harvard president James BryantConant...
...reveal various levels of biological contamination and the spread of the disease through hospital vents. Still, the whole operation looks musclebound. Outbreak is really about the lumbering, quasimilitary maneuvers that go into big-budget filmmaking. If Preston's virus story were a virus, the Outbreak team would aim an H-bomb at it. And the Hot Zone people would be sitting around apprehensively, waiting for it to develop...