Word: lethal
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...threatening bubble had dissolved. The radiation readings outside Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant were nearing normal. Slowly the nightmare was ending without anyone receiving a lethal overdose of radiation, either inside the plant or out. The 100,000 or so of the area's 650,000 residents who had left started to trickle home, although many children and pregnant women, on the advice of Governor Richard Thornburgh, were staying away until the government said flatly that the reactor that had so nearly run away was safe...
Even in the adjoining auxiliary building, separated by four feet of concrete and a stainless steel shield from the deadly gases, the radiation in some spots exceeded 1,000 rems, twice a lethal dose. Yet Edward Houser, a chemistry foreman at the plant, had put on his antiradiation gear, including three pairs of coveralls and a full-face respirator, in order to draw a vital sample of contaminated water to help his colleagues figure out what was happening. He absorbed only four rems during his mission; a total of five is the limit set by the plant for a year...
...able to shrink existing missiles by 12% before these weapons would be classified as new ones. The U.S., however, maintains that more than a 5% change fundamentally alters a missile's characteristics and that a smaller new weapon, utilizing technological advances in miniaturization, could be even more lethal than an older but larger...
...they acquitted the pair. A shocked jury took all of 15 minutes to convict. Ritter lost his urge to die during the two years he has spent sitting on death row, and is still appealing his case. But Evans asked only that he be put to death by a lethal injection, so he could donate his organs to medicine (burning them by electrocution, he has said, would be a "waste...
...classic English recipe beginning "First catch two dozen trout," the principal challenge to the do-it-yourself bombmaker is the snaring of radioactive material. In Z Warning, by Dan Oran and Lonn Hoklin (Ballantine; 336 pages; $8.95), the snatch-80 kilos of plutonium dioxide-is executed with lethal efficiency. The gang that pulls the job has its fusion in a Western mental hospital. There the principals-a deranged young Texas millionaire, a female Japanese physicist suffering from Nagasaki syndrome and a dishonorably discharged black Vietvet -first pool their malignant talents. The group's nuclear capability is channeled...