Word: kiloton
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...explosion marked the start of a new and crucial phase in the development of France's atomic arsenal. From the four explosions in the Sahara in 1960-61 and subsequent tests, the French developed a 60-kiloton Abomb, but it is so bulky that France's 40 or 50 force de frappe Mirage IV jet bombers are able to carry only one apiece. What the French hope to achieve in the new tests is a smaller, powerful warhead to ride atop the intermediate-range missile for which silos are already being dug in France's Haute-Provence...
...major ground war against the U.S. at this time. Said one Asia expert: "The benefits to China would be nil; they are now getting all of the advantages [from Viet Nam] with no real risks." And, since it will be at least five years before even the primitive 20-kiloton package exploded at Lop Nor can be delivered onto global targets, it seemed likely that the current Chinese thunder is being generated by nothing more than a swarm of anxious mosquitoes...
Peking is now believed capable of building several 20-to 30-kiloton nuclear devices a year, probably has enough fissionable material on hand to stage a second test at any time. Uranium is in good supply, as is lithium, an important H-bomb material...
...probably deliver a bomb a lot sooner than the five to ten years that U.S. officials first believed it would take. The U.S. moved from "explosion" at Alamogordo to bomb over Hiroshima in less than three weeks. If the Chinese are thinking in terms of a clumsy, 20-kiloton blockbuster like Hiroshima's (10 ft. long, 28 in. wide, and weighing 9,000 Ibs.), they could probably deliver it along their periphery within six months. Peking's 275 Russian-built IL-28 bombers are capacious enough to carry such bombs to targets up to 600 miles away...
...years, cost them more than $200 million and the talents of 1,800 scientists and engineers - all of which were badly needed elsewhere in China's near-starvation economy. Western experts believe the blast was fueled by plutonium and was slightly smaller than that of the 20-kiloton bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 19 years...