Word: megatons
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...When Los Alamos Physicist Donald R. Westervelt learned about this, he designed a detection system based upon it. A few dozen of his detectors spotted around the earth would be an adequate network. Some of them would always be under clear skies. In daylight they would detect a one-megaton burst 2,000,000 miles from the earth, much farther at night. Cost of each station...
...weapon. Their guidance systems would know exactly where they were, so they could be programed to strike in any desired direction. If an all-out war started, the high-flying minefields should be able to rise from the sea, triggered by electrical or sonic code signals, and carry their megaton warheads to far parts of the earth...
...engines may even be used as secondary power sources to give an extra 15,000 Ibs. of thrust to the B-52 on takeoff. The Hound Dogs do not interfere with the B-52's normal H-bomb load; each missile simply adds a one-megaton hydrogen punch and an extra reach that combine to make a single B-52 the mightiest weapon ever seen...
...warheads designed for the Polaris and Minuteman solid-fuel missiles, which the U.S. is depending upon to close the missile gap in the mid-1960s, pack a nuclear punch of about half a megaton, compared with an estimated eight megatons carried by Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, and about three or four megatons in the nose cone of the U.S.'s Atlas ICBM. With additional nuclear tests, the yield of the Polaris and Minuteman warheads could be significantly increased, although Admiral William Raborn Jr. has said he needs no further tests of the present Polaris warhead. Some U.S. scientists...
...kiloton is the equivalent in blast of 1,000 tons of TNT. The bomb that wrecked Hiroshima measured about 20 kilotons. In the strange vocabulary of nuclear weapons, a one-kiloton weapon is considered "small." A megaton is 1,000 kilotons, or the equivalent of 1,000,000 tons...