Word: megaton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...five-megaton H-bomb fell on Union Station," wreaking "total destruction within three miles," but by that time, reported civil defense officials, the President was "well out of danger" at a secrecy-shrouded mountaintop "Emergency White House" (one of several alternate command posts) less than 200 miles away. There, with his staff, he settled down to direct dry-run command operations under a simulated "unlimited state of emergency." One by one, the bulletins flashed in over the closed-circuit emergency communications system: enemy aircraft were striking south from Alaska and Canada; 100 U.S. cities were blasted in atomic attack. Adding...
...megaton is an explosive energy of 1,800 ooo tons...
...this flow of information is based the official AEC position, recently expressed by Scientist-Commissioner Willard F. Libby. In general. Chemist Libby's view is calm. As a scientist, he knows that fission products from megaton* explosions rise into the stratosphere and circulate round the earth for years. Most threatening of them is strontium 90, whose long half-life (28 years) keeps it potent during its stratospheric circling, and whose habit of lodging for keeps in human bone makes it a probable cause of leukemia and bone cancer...
...Libby is well aware of the adverse opinion swirling around him. He thinks the AEC does not get proper credit for the effort it is making to find out more about the effects of fallout on humans. The AEC has also markedly reduced the radioactive poisons released by its megaton bomb tests, and it promises to make future tests even "cleaner...
From the military point of view, clean megaton bombs have two strikes against them: 1) they are built at very high cost in explosive yield, presumably because they cannot use cheap and plentiful uranium 238; and 2) they may be good for special military uses, such as obliterating a city whose site must be occupied soon, but they lack the full punch of "dirty" megaton bombs. No one could be sure that a U.S. enemy, for instance, would use a clean bomb to obliterate Washington when the fallout of a dirty one might kill, in addition, most of the inhabitants...