Word: megatons
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Sagan and Ehrlich picked as their "baseline case" a 5,000 megaton war. (One megaton equals 1 million tons of TNT; the explosive power of all strategic nuclear warheads possessed by the U.S. and Soviet Union is thought to total 12,000 megatons.) The results of such a war: a cloud of dust and smoke weighing 1.2 billion tons rapidly envelops the Northern Hemisphere and swiftly swirls into the Southern Hemisphere as well, blocking out 90% or more of the sun's light. Surface temperatures plunge to an average of -13° F and remain below freezing for three...
...time of truth arrived when he received sheaves of photographs taken during the preceding few days by U.S. reconnaissance planes over Cuba. They furnished staggering proof of a massive, breakneck buildup of Soviet missile power on Castro's island. Already poised were missiles capable of hurling a megaton each-or roughly 50 times the destructive power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb-at the U.S. Under construction were sites for launching five-megaton missiles...
...outbursts of energy, in the form of X rays and gamma rays, that are observable only above the earth's atmospheric shield. Such puzzling "highenergy transients," as scientists call them, rarely last more than ten seconds, yet they pack a wallop as great as a billion billion one-megaton H-bombs.* What could possibly cause such implausibly powerful explosions far out in space...
...deadly weapons," the U.S. will be able to add more silos near the proposed Dense Pack field and move some of the 100 MX missiles into them, adding a shell-game kind of deception. "We would prefer that the Soviets dismantle SS-18s [which can carry either ten 1-megaton warheads or a single 25-megaton monster] rather than we build more holes," Reagan said. "But we can accommodate either." Weinberger had advised Reagan not to mention this option of deception, arguing that it would sound too much like Carter's racetrack. Even if expanded, however, Reagan insisted that...
...nuke" indiscriminately. "If they were caught out of position, they would try to retrieve the battle with nuclear weapons," says Janus Director Donald Blumenthal, a retired Army colonel working at the California weapons-research laboratory. One officer who let his position deteriorate beyond recovery reached into his megaton arsenal, picked the largest weapon and dropped it where he guessed the Red Army had massed...