Word: megatons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Already the laboratory is probably obsolete. If a 5-megaton H-bomb like the one detonated in "Operation Ivy" (TIME, April 12) were aimed at the White House, experts calculate that the laboratory would lie within the "heavy damage" radius (three to seven miles); and the expendable south annex would be shattered. If a much larger H-bomb were dropped, the monolith's chances of survival would be slim indeed...
...upcoming test of "Jughead," the 45-megaton bomb, would produce a radius of approximately 6.7 miles of utter destruction and 22.3 miles of severe-to-slight blast damage. Jughead's calculated effects on some major U.S. cities...
...destiny than its creatures. The change in the hands which governed the two greatest powers brought a strange sense of indecisiveness to world affairs. The strain of the cold war brought hesitations and serious arguments to the Western Alliance. The dawning of the thermonuclear age, with its talk of megaton bombs (equal to 1,000,000 tons of TNT), cast great and sudden doubt on the validity of the thinking and the plans of statesmen and diplomats and soldiers. Both sides were caught in a sort of pause, to re-examine and to retool. It was in this atmosphere...
...they reported, weighed about eleven tons, and could destroy a square city block. The old-fashioned atomic bombs (i.e., uranium and plutonium) are measured in "kilo-tons," or thousands of tons of TNT; the Hiroshima blast rated 20 kilotons. The H-bomb, by comparison, is measured by the "megaton"-a million tons...
would send a heat flash sufficient to ignite combustible material, or to cause killing third-degree burns on exposed skin, within an area of 300 square miles."- Said the Alsops: "We can no longer doubt that men can make . . . the ten-megaton bomb with a force of 10 million tons of TNT." Air Secretary Thomas Finletter was just as gloomy as the Alsops. He said: "The destructive power of atomic weapons includes not only explosive blasts of force and heat but also the gamma ray-a ray which is deadly to human life. The gamma ray is, as it were...