Word: megaton
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...relatively small nuclear devices the U.S. is likely to continue underground tests, but the more powerful sod busters of the future will have to be tested in the open because the earth's crust cannot hold them. Former Atomic Energy Commissioner Willard F. Libby estimates that a ten-megaton test would need to be exploded 18 miles below the surface. At this depth the rock is probably so plastic that digging a test hole would be impossible. Another possibility is to fire tests above the earth's atmosphere, as the U.S. did on a small scale in Project...
...full-scale nuclear attack on the U.S. would without doubt be many times the size of the 1,446-megaton attack that is estimated to kill 50 million Americans. A full-scale nuclear attack would probably kill everybody, whether or not fallout shelters had been built...
...Soviets do, for clear-cut U.S. nuclear superiority is the best deterrent to attack. A few further nuclear tests, they say, would boost threefold the blast power of the two key U.S. deterrent missiles - the mobile, solid-fueled Polaris and Minuteman -which now carry warheads of one-half megaton, v. an estimated eight megatons for Soviet ICBMs. Testing would also speed development of a next-generation "neutron bomb." Now on the drawing boards, that weapon is designed to bom bard a specific area with showers of le thal, invisible neutron "bullets." Because its fusion reaction is to be triggered...
...fill this need, the Navy developed its submarine-launched Polaris, an intermediate range (1,200 miles) solid-fueled missile. The Air Force went to work on Minuteman, designed to be fired some 6,000 miles from bases in the continental U.S. Like Polaris. Minuteman packs a half-megaton punch (only one-third of the explosive load of the fully developed, liquid-fueled Atlas and only one-fifth of the giant warhead of the liquid Titan). Like Polaris and the Army's tactical Pershing missile, Minuteman is cheaper and far simpler to handle than its liquid-fueled predecessors, requires...
...generations and require the cultivation of high-yielding algae on every rooftop to feed the elbow-to-elbow masses. But even more dangerous than biodeto-nation is "sophidetonation": the ever-quickening accumulation of scientific knowledge. One likely effect of sophidetonation, says Cole, is a war fought with megaton or perhaps gigaton* nuclear weapons, and although this might serve as a drastic check on biodetonation, it would not leave the earth a pleasant place to live...