Word: kilotons
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...bomb threat that terrified Orlando, Fla., for 36 hours. Nor is cost a deterrent. University of Virginia Professor Mason Willrich, a nuclear-arms expert, estimates that a weapons fabrication and assembly plant that can manufacture ten fission warheads annually costs about $8 million to build. Each 20-kiloton warhead would run less than $15 million, plus the cost of the fissionable material. This is within the reach of even the most impoverished nation willing to divert resources from social programs...
...study conducted for the Ford Foundation by Atomic Physicist Theodore B. Taylor and Arms Control Expert Mason Willrich makes the point even more strongly. In "Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards," Taylor and Willrich report that amateur bombmakers could probably put together weapons as small as one-tenth of a kiloton (equivalent to the explosive force of 100 tons of TNT). Such bombs, says Taylor, would be powerful enough to topple the twin towers of Manhattan's 110-story World Trade Center or destroy the U.S. Capitol building...
Last May, in an operation named Project Rio Blanco, the AEC exploded three 30-kiloton devices that had been placed about 450 ft. apart in a vertical tube more than a mile underground near the hamlet of Meeker in western Colorado. The goal was to crack the surrounding sandstone and create a huge cavern into which the escaping gas could seep. But when the AEC and its private-industry collaborator. CER Geonuclear Corp. of Las Vegas, began test drilling at the site after the explosions, they made an embarrassing discovery. The blasts had apparently created three separate gas-filled caverns...
...forces to defeat the combined Arab forces. But if Israel should find itself facing extinction, it is widely assumed that it possesses nuclear weapons, which its leaders might risk the wrath of world opinion by employing. Israel is thought to have an arsenal of low-yield bombs in the kiloton range that can be delivered by specially adapted Israeli air force planes...
...refine the technique of nuclear drilling. As for radioactivity levels in the gas, the AEC says that improvements in bomb design will minimize the problem in future blasts. Those improvements would presumably be incorporated into both the Rio Blanco devices and Project Wagon Wheel, a five-bomb, 500-kiloton underground explosion scheduled...