Word: megatons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...keeping with an agreement reached before the broadcast, the panel avoided prickly questions of national policy. The American participants-Harvard University Cardiologists Bernard Lown and James Muller and Tufts University Professor John Pastore-discussed such topics as the effects of a one-megaton bomb on a city, medical care for nuclear victims and the long-term effects of radiation fallout. The Soviets likewise avoided ideological confrontations. Said Yevgeni Chazov, one of President Leonid Brezhnev's physicians: "We have come here openly and honestly to tell the people about our movement, whose main objective is the preservation of life...
...missile armed with a one-megaton nuclear warhead, probably launched from a Soviet submarine cruising in the North Atlantic, detonates near ground level at the Science Center. Within seconds, Memorial Hall and the Yard disappear into a crater more than 200 feet deep. The third largest library in the world is flattened, its collection buried under a thick crust of radioactive soil thrown up from the blast's hole. Little is left standing between the Quad and the Charles River...
...than their absolute numbers. From Greenville, S.C., to Clackamas County, Ore., local officials issued declarations of support. In 200 of the 650 towns and cities that held Ground Zero observances, markers were installed, each signifying the center of a 12-sq.-rrfi. circle of total destruction that a one-megaton warhead would wreak. Around the Ground Zero spot in Billings, Mont., a mime group per, formed an antiwar piece; in neighboring North Dakota, 600 people in Grand Forks applauded a speaker's suggestion that the Government dismantle one of the state's 300 Minuteman missiles as a symbolic...
...numbers are indeed ambiguous. The Soviets unquestionably are ahead by some measures. Their strategic nuclear weapons have a total explosive power of 7,868 megatons (one megaton equals 1 million tons of TNT), vs. 3,505 megatons for the U.S.; and the Soviets have 2,537 delivery vehicles (missiles, bombers, launching tubes on submarines) to rain those megatons on an enemy, to America's 1,944. But the U.S. still has a clear, though rapidly shrinking, lead in nuclear warheads...
...late April, a cloudless Thursday evening in Detroit. Assume further that there is no advance warning. Shortly after 8:30, the lone warhead of a Soviet SS-13 missile comes swooping down. Six thousand feet, directly above the intersection of Interstate Highways 94 and 75, the 1-megaton bomb-only a fiftieth as large as the Soviets' largest warhead-explodes with the force of 1 million tons...