Word: megatons
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...intercepted at a distance any closer than about 150 million km (93 million miles), only nuclear explosives pack enough wallop to avert disaster. At that distance, the energy needed to deflect a 2-km-wide (1 1/4-mile) object enough to spare Earth is about the equivalent of a 1-megaton nuclear explosion. If the object gets to about a tenth of that distance, the energy required is 100 megatons, more powerful than any nuclear device yet exploded...
Would the relocation plan have worked? A 1962 study for the Pentagon examined the daytime and nighttime locations of the dozen officials in the line of presidential succession and concluded they were all often well within the kill range of a nuclear assault on the capital. With a 100-megaton weapon, a helicopter anywhere within 50 miles of the White House would have been destroyed in flight, the report noted. There were also unexpected hazards. During one doomsday exercise, Eisenhower was driven by convoy from Washington. As he neared the site, a truck loaded with pigs entered the narrow road...
That tune comes midpoint on Human Touch and catches Springsteen in full cry as a "thief in the house of love," doing one of those 40-megaton rave-ups that can bring stadium crowds to their feet. Human Touch was the first of the two albums to be completed, and, with the backing of some heavy-duty Los Angeles session players and such soulful voices as Bobby King and Sam Moore, it has a real diamond-cut luster and precision. It also has plenty of nerve. Two tunes, Man's Job and Real Man, trash all the stereotypes of rock...
...theory in the minds of strategists everywhere in the form of strategists bombing. First used by the Spanish Fascists, by the end of the war it was standard Allied policy. "Secondary targets," i.e. city populations, were subject to hundreds of sorties a day, and the idea of dropping a megaton of explosives on a city became an achievable goal. The black skies over Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne and Tokyo--choked with bombladen planes--were mirrored on the ground by raging firestorms that swept through the cities killing up to 100,000 people in a single...
...idea arose of placing our missile units in Cuba. Only a narrow circle of people knew about the plan. We concluded that we could send 42 missiles, each with a warhead of one megaton. We picked targets in the U.S. to inflict the maximum damage. We saw that our weapons could inspire terror. The two nuclear weapons the U.S. used against Japan at the end of the war were toys by comparison...