Word: hydrogenized
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Last week, on a radio round table sponsored by the University of Chicago, Associate Professor Harrison Brown sprang a chiller to top all chillers. The blast effects of hydrogen bombing, Brown told his nationwide audience, will be only the beginning; the radioactive aftereffects will be far worse. Hydrogen explosions, he said, will fill the air with fiercely radiating isotopes. They will drift with the wind, he believes, like a swarm of invisible locusts, killing people, animals, insects, plants...
Take a Continent. Warming to his subject, he told just how the U.S. might attack the U.S.S.R. All that is necessary, he said, is to explode large hydrogen bombs on a line extending north & south across Europe. The radioactivity "would be carried eastward by the winds, destroying all life within a strip 1,500 miles wide, extending from Leningrad to Odessa, and 3,000 miles deep, extending from Prague to the Ural Mountains...
Tons of Neutrons. This week, on a similar broadcast, Brown repeated his shocker. Physicist Leo Szilard of Chicago added that 50 tons of neutrons released by hydrogen fusion could ring the earth with a radioactive dust layer capable of killing the earth's entire population. Physicists Frederick Seitz of the University of Illinois and Hans Bethe of Cornell, appearing on the same program, were more moderate, but they went along generally with their emphatic colleagues...
...scientist pooh-poohs the hydrogen bomb. The uranium bomb itself is a fearful weapon, capable of cutting the guts out of a great city. Hydrogen bombs, if they work as well as expected, will be many times more fearsome than uranium bombs. But there is an enormous difference between a bomb that will disrupt a city and kill its people and one that will wipe all life off the face of a continent or the earth...
Both uranium and hydrogen bombs will leave some radioactive residues. If a uranium bomb is exploded near the ground (as the first one at Alamogordo), the "fission products" make a small area radioactive for a long time. But most of the fission products rise high in the atmosphere. When the bomb is exploded 1,80b ft. above the ground (as at Hiroshima), virtually all the fission products are carried up, where they do no damage...