Word: megaton
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...fallout from Russia's 30-megaton bomb drifted eastward from Novaya Zemlya last week, few governments acted so elaborately unconcerned as the satellite regimes. But Eastern Europe's people showed their alarm by buying up prodigious quantities of table salt in the widespread (and erroneous) belief that a salt rub is the best protection against radioactivity...
...test, Khrushchev's superbomb prompted many of those who respect or merely fear Russia to re-examine their consciences. In the U.N. a number of small nations that are normally reluctant to offend Moscow pluckily backed an emergency appeal to Khrushchev expressing "deep concern" over his scheduled 50-megaton explosion -though other small nations and neutrals eventually emasculated it. Britain's most influential Ban-the-Bomber, Philosopher Bertrand Russell, who has been quicker to censure the U.S. than the U.S.S.R. for possessing nuclear arms, stormed out of an hour-long protest meeting with Russian embassy officials. He explained...
After a few days delay to conceal the workings of their detection systems, U.S. authorities began last week to release a few details about the 30-megaton nuclear test in the Soviet Arctic. A 30-megaton explosion is not easy to hide. The island of Novaya Zemlya adjoins the international waters of the Barents Sea, and U.S. airplanes were presumably cruising near the Soviet test range. U.S. submarines were probably watching through periscopes, just as Russian submarines keep track of U.S. rocket shots from Cape Canaveral. Besides such eye and camera witnesses, the U.S. had a varied array of instruments...
...5TRATOSPHERIC FALLOUT. The third kind of fallout-stratospheric-will not disappear so quickly. Bombs of more than a megaton of power send a large part of their ballooning fireballs climbing high into the stratosphere where there are no falling raindrops or snowflakes. In the frigid stable stratosphere, extremely fine particles of radioactive matter from a big bomb may hang suspended for years-and the bigger the bomb, the more of its dangerous fallout goes into the stratosphere...
...much long-term damage will be done? Radiation health experts are still debating, but all agree about one thing: if Khrushchev explodes his threatened 50-megaton test as the climax of the Soviet series, radiation all over the earth will start an inexorable climb toward a much higher and more dangerous level than it has ever reached before...