Word: megatons
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...obscured the sun over the nation's capital last week, the President of the U.S. closeted himself in the White House conference room for a crucial meeting with the members of the National Security Council. The Soviet Union's continued nuclear testing, climaxed by a 50-plus megaton explosion, left room for only one topic on the usually crowded agenda: how the U.S. should act to protect its own interests. After listening gravely to his advisers, John F. Kennedy walked briskly into his oval office to meet waiting reporters. Rarely had they seen him so grim, so abrupt...
Political Act. Many U.S. military thinkers believe that the Russian blast of a 50-megaton bomb indicates weakness rather than strength: it could mean that the Soviet Union does not have enough missiles to deliver large numbers of smaller, but perhaps more effective, nuclear warheads. But whatever the Soviet military motives for exploding the monster bomb-and not everyone was as optimistic as the military-the free world had no doubt that one of Khrushchev's chief aims was purely and simply to terrorize and intimidate the world...
...this reason, President Kennedy called the 50-megaton test "a political rather than a military act,'' pointed out that the U.S. could make a 50-megaton bomb any time it wished (for that matter, each SAC B-52 carries two 25-megaton bombs, which the U.S. considers more effective than a 50-megatoner). But, said John Kennedy, such a bomb would presently be "primarily a mass killer of people in war" rather than a nuclear weapon of any real military use. "Fear is the oldest weapon in history," said Kennedy. "Throughout the life of mankind, it has been...
...health. At one extreme is Dr. Linus Pauling, Caltech's Nobel Prizewinning chemist, who believes that the fallout danger point was reached when the U.S. exploded the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in 1945 to usher in the Atomic Age. Pauling estimates that one 50-megaton bomb alone would cause 40,000 babies to be born with physical defects in the next few generations, and 400,000 more defective or still-born babies over the next 6,000 years-or slightly more than one a week. He also expects uncounted cases of bone cancer, leukemia...
...nuclear bombs, even up to 100-megaton size, cost little more than small ones. By successive experiments the AEC lopes to learn how to store the energy of large explosions in salt or rock. If a multimegaton explosion can be safely confined underground, the power it produces may be cheap enough to compete with electricity from conventional sources...