Word: megatons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...feels--and rightly--has been neglected: the firestorm which the detonation of a bomb at the proper height can cause. As the size of the bomb increases, he points out, the fire radius increase at many times the rate at which the blast radius increases. Thus, "the 50-megaton bomb... must have a blast radius of about 13 miles, but an incendiary radius of 50; a 100-megaton bomb would have a blast radius of about 17 miles and an incendiary radius of 70 miles...
...With the report on Red progress, scientists came to the inescapable conclusion that the Soviets are technically capable of producing just about any warhead in the U.S. arsenal. Moreover, in view of their yield-weight success, they might well be able to package one of their monstrous, 50-plus megaton bombs in a warhead tipping a missile well within known Soviet rocket-thrust capabilities...
Charging the West with preparing for war, Khrushchev cried: "We would be slobbering idiots if we did not carry out the nuclear tests." As a result of its test program, said Khrushchev, the Soviet Union had perfected 50-and 100-megaton bombs-and some that were even bigger. What was more, Khrushchev boasted that Russia could readily convert the rockets that orbited its two astronauts to deliver the U.S.S.R.'s thermonuclear superkillers. Said he: "Not a single place on earth can consider itself safe from them...
...voice rising, his face turning beet red, Khrushchev declared that none of the Western powers had built a bomb of even 50 megatons. Shouted he: "The 50-and 100-megaton bombs will always hang over their heads like the sword of Damocles...
When the Soviet 50-megaton test-bomb exploded on Novaya Zemlya last October, it set the earth's whole atmosphere vibrating. Last week in London, Seismologists Eric Carpenter, George Harwood and Thomas Whiteside reported how the bomb waves looked when they were recorded on the microbarograph at Britain's Atomic Weapons Research Establishment...