Word: megaton
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...warhead would have to be tested underground. The choice fell on one of the world's most remote islands-Amchitka, near the end of Alaska's Aleutian chain-where AEC officials dug a shaft more than a mile deep, and proposed to lower the five-megaton Spartan warhead down to the bottom. All it cost was $200 million, and they anticipated no trouble...
...Heat Engine. By thus "seeding" Ginger, scientists of Stormfury-a joint Commerce and Defense departments project-hoped to diminish the hurricane's awesome power, equivalent to the wallop of 400 20-megaton hydrogen bombs. Literally a huge heat engine, a hurricane is formed by spirals of warm, moist air rising from tropical seas. As the heat-packed vapor spins increasingly faster, it converges toward the eye of the storm and is forced upward; meanwhile within the eye, the temperature rises and pressure drops. Acting like a chimney, the walls of the warm vortex continue to refuel themselves...
Environmentalists predicted earthquakes or other disasters when the Atomic Energy Commission exploded a one-megaton nuclear device on Alaska's Amchitka Island in 1969. In fact, the feared mishap did not occur. Now the AEC is back for another round, and so are the environmentalists...
...Helsinki this summer, they will at last have something solid to discuss. One serious obstacle to an arms-limitation treaty had been overcome. In past talks, the U.S. had insisted upon putting a ceiling on both offensive and defensive nuclear weapons; it was especially fearful of the huge, 25-megaton Soviet S59 intercontinental ballistic missile, which is capable of destroying U.S. Minuteman sites. The Soviets, on the other hand, wanted to concentrate on a reduction of defensive weapons only-anti-ballistic missiles that would protect U.S. ICBMs against Russian attack. Now Washington and Moscow linked the two types of weapons...
...land-based ICBMs, submarine-carried missiles, airborne bombs) that either side would be allowed to maintain. The suggested ceiling: 1,900. There would also be a "sub-limit" prohibiting the Soviets from assembling more than, say, 250 missiles in the size range of the huge SS-9, whose 25-megaton warheads can wipe out U.S. ICBMs even in the hardest silos. As part of the total U.S. package, the American delegation last year proposed that ABM systems be either banned outright or limited to the defense of Moscow and Washington...