Word: megaton
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...have almost completed the development of the first British megaton bomb...
Adlai Stevenson has recently taken a forthright stand on stopping the tests of multi-megaton weapons. His proposal has been called "dangerous" and "visionary" by the Republicans. In particular, they have scoffed at the threat of radioactive strontium contamination. Even Senator Kefauver is quoted by the New York Times (Sunday, Oct. 21, p. 55) as conceding that the tests could be continued for thirty years at the present rate without damage. However, Ralph Lapp, the eminent nuclear physicist, has recently found an error of a factor of forty in the rate of accumulation of this deadly poison. In an article...
...changed all the equations of scientific war, and it forced on the Department of Defense a grave decision: to concentrate intensively on the ICBM. No longer did the intercontinental ballistic missile need to hit a one-mile "pickle barrel" to be effective. A T-N (thermonuclear) warhead in the megaton range (equivalent to millions of tons of TNT) would blot out a large city even if it exploded well outside the city's limits, and its radioactive fallout would have a killing effect a long way downwind. So the ICBM, besides being fairly small, might be fairly inaccurate...
...megaton bomb (equivalent in energy to 10 million tons of TNT), says Libby, creates 1,100 Ibs. of radioactive fission products. Airborne for one day and then spread evenly over an area of 100,000 square miles, it would give each unsheltered person a dose of 67 roentgens per day. This is not far from the strength of the "snow" that fell on the Marshall Islanders.* They survived because they were evacuated promptly and cared for well, but as Libby remarks in an understatement, evacuation of 100,000 square miles (more than twice the size of New York State...
...Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Physicist Ralph E. Lapp describes the radioactive aftereffects of the U.S. H-bomb tests in the Pacific. Dr. Lapp figures that a is-megaton H-bomb exploded near the ground will make an area of 4,000 square miles, mostly downwind, so radioactive that all people in it will get a "serious to lethal dose" in the first day alone. If they cannot evacuate, they will get more. Dr. Lapp believes that the explosion of 50 superbombs could blanket the entire northeastern U.S. "in a serious to lethal radioactive...