Word: megatons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...released last month by the Office of Technology Assessment. An arm of Congress, the OTA analyzed several levels of nuclear exchange. Among them was a classic case of controlled nuclear war: an attack on U.S. oil refineries by ten Soviet SS-18 missiles, each carrying eight warheads of one megaton force. Such an attack would destroy an estimated 64% of U.S. petroleum-refining capacity, along with railways, petrochemical plants, and storage facilities near the refineries...
...Harold Brown argued this point last month before several Senate committees. Yet two major issues lead one to wonder if the proposed budget is just the bare minimum. First, with regard to the nuclear deterrent, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara determined that an adequate nuclear deterrent was 200-400 megaton equivalents, enough explosive to destroy about 30% of Soviet population and 70% of industry in a second strike. Today the U.S. deploys over 10,000 strategic nuclear warheads, many times the McNamara deterrent, as well as 20,000 "tactical" nuclear warheads. Thus the nuclear weapons load grows, but the target...
...bona-fide Toga Party, or so they claimed. Since no one was sufficiently familiar with the rites of Toga, participants behaved according to American '70s' custom. Beer and vodka flowed, the usual dislocated mutterings that pass for conversation at such gatherings coalesced into a dull roar, and the megaton stereo boomed out a never-ending series of syncopated disco thuds. Occasionally someone would chase a friend through the crowd threatening affectionately to straighten her (his?) toga or die trying, but onlookers just smiled timidly and continued to sip their punch...
...Morgan? Why not Carnegie or Rockefeller? Why not Svensen or Von Humboldt or Verrazanno or Sun Yatsen? Well, Morgan explains, he threw away his first name, Sanche-a contraction of St. Charles -and scrambled the letters of De Gramont. Among the anagrams that resulted were Dr. Montage, R.D. Megaton and Ted Morgan. Morgan, he felt, was someone you would lend your car to. Dogs and small children would like...
...missile's Mk-12 warhead will be replaced with the Mk-12A. Using miniaturized arming and fusing components, the new warhead will be able to contain enough payload to double its explosive yield from 170 kilotons to 350 kilotons of TNT. This is still far below the 1 megaton (1,000 kilotons) clout of each of the eight warheads carried in the huge SS-18 that the Soviet Union is already deploying. But, with the improved guidance system, the Mk-12A will be much more accurate than an SS-18 warhead, and as a result will have...