Word: megatoner
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...large-yield weapons field, caught up with it in the medium-yield field, and are closing the gap in the low-yield range. This gives the Russians great military flexibility and enables them to place more powerful warheads on smaller missiles. The top Russian test blast of 58 megatons would have yielded 100 megatons if it had not been encased in a lead jacket, and U.S. experts estimate that its air-dropped device weighed only 20,000 to 30,000 lbs. If that estimate is correct, the Russians could easily refine the device into a 100-megaton warhead...
Only the knowledge (or hope, now) that your review of Fallout protection does not typify the attitude of a large majority of Cambridge students keeps me from wishing that the very first 50 megaton bomb from the Soviet Union might be aimed at a point some 100 feet in front of the University Theatre...
Though the Government's official shelter booklet uses 5-megaton bombs as the basis for its calculations, bigger warheads, with greater destructive power over a wider radius, must certainly be reckoned with. A 50-megaton blast could ignite frame houses up to 60 miles from Ground Zero, burning or asphyxiating many people in basement fallout shelters-or tumbling their houses down on them. Scientists also think a nuclear blast might produce a fierce fire storm, which would suck up oxygen over large areas and kill all in its path-but no one can be certain...
...solid reassurance that when it comes to nuclear war we can thwart the Commies every time. They're even helping us do it. To begin with (and this is what the pamphlets' authors posit their entire civil defense program on, the enemy apparently plans to use only five-megaton "nuclear weapons." ("There are much larger weapons which could do more damage, but the damage from larger weapons does not increase in direct ratio to the size of the weapons"--so forget them.) And the Department hints at another Communist weakness by mentioning that "a tall apartment or office building...
...cognoscenti may pass this off as absurd. Why should Russia use only five-megaton bombs? And what apartment or office building will be more than 10 miles from ground zero? But the Pentagon has closer ties to the CIA than we do, and if the CIA thinks the Commies are going to attack Westchester County instead of Wall Street, that's the way it's going...