Word: megatons
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...objects 300 ft. or larger and detected late in the game, however, nuclear weapons may well be the only answer. If XF11 had been discovered only 90 million miles away and on a beeline toward Earth, for example, the equivalent of a 1-megaton explosion would have been necessary to shove it into a safe orbit. Had it first been spotted at just a tenth of that distance, a 100-megaton blast would have been needed to turn it away...
...year, a previously unknown asteroid some 1,600 ft. across was spotted four days before it whipped by Earth, missing us by only 280,000 miles--a hairbreadth by astronomical standards. Had it struck Earth, scientists say, the explosion would have been in the 3,000-to-12,000-megaton range, roughly equivalent to the explosive power of all the world's nuclear weapons going off at once...
Duncan Steel, an Australian astronomer, has calculated that if the asteroid had struck Earth, it would have hit at some 58,000 m.p.h. The resulting explosion, scientists estimate, would have been in the 3,000-to-12,000-megaton range. That, says astronomer Eugene Shoemaker, a pioneer asteroid and comet hunter, "is like taking all of the U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons, putting them in one pile and blowing them...
...THEIR QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE, SCIENTISTS WILL take advantage of anything that's helpful, even a nuclear blast. Studies of the shock waves given off by a Chinese .66-megaton nuclear test have revealed a "continent" 2,000 miles underground, at the boundary between the molten iron of the planet's core and the molten rock just above it. The word continent is used loosely; what two scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey found was a region 200 miles across and 80 miles deep that is denser than surrounding regions. The implication: the core-mantle boundary may be as complex...
Still, the very notion of having high-megaton missiles at the ready, either on Earth or in orbit, was unsettling to many at the workshop, who feared that they could be turned against fellow humans rather than cosmic interlopers. They simply "did not want to talk about very large amounts of energy," says Canavan. "And therefore they wanted to ignore the problem." Some suggested heatedly, in leaks to the press, that pro-nuclear Star Wars scientists, frustrated by the down-sizing of their projects, were using the asteroid and comet threat as an excuse for revitalizing their jobs...