Word: megaton
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...main charge of fusion material, which is essentially deuterium (heavy hydrogen). Fission detonators are expensive, but a single one can explode any amount of comparatively cheap fusion material. Result: the bigger the bomb, the cheaper it is in terms of explosive yield. Clark figures that a ten-megaton bomb costs somewhat more than $1,000,000, mostly for the detonator. But further increases in yield cost only about $5,000 per megaton, so that the price tag on a 100-megaton bomb is roughly $1,500,000. A 1,000-megaton bomb would cost $6,000,000. Once they acquired...
Among the techniques: >A nuclear bomb could be loaded on a submarine or barge and planted on the ocean bottom near the coast of a target country. Exploded under two miles of water (at the aggressor's will and from great distance), a 20,000-megaton bomb would stir up a wave whose crest would still be 100 feet high after it had traveled 200 miles. It would wash most coastlines bare and ride far inland...
...better Doomsday effect, large bombs could be made as radioactive as possible. One way is to "salt" them with sodium, which becomes intensely radioactive when it absorbs neutrons. Clark figures that a 20,000-megaton bomb of this kind would contaminate 200,000 square miles (four times the area of New York State) so heavily that even people in basement shelters would surely die. But since the half life of radioactive sodium 24 is only 15 hours, the bomb's products would lose much of their punch before the wind could carry them around the earth. Thus, a sodium...
...health. At one extreme is Dr. Linus Pauling, Caltech's Nobel Prizewinning chemist, who believes that the fallout danger point was reached when the U.S. exploded the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in 1945 to usher in the Atomic Age. Pauling estimates that one 50-megaton bomb alone would cause 40,000 babies to be born with physical defects in the next few generations, and 400,000 more defective or still-born babies over the next 6,000 years-or slightly more than one a week. He also expects uncounted cases of bone cancer, leukemia...
...underdog. It was a difficult ploy-especially in a district that has a large Mexican-American population and that hasn't sent a Republican to Congress since 1920-until Dwight Eisenhower arrived to stump for Goode. Then Gonzalez opened the tear ducts: "They brought down their big 50-megaton bomb to drop on this poor little Mexican...