Word: multimegaton
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...life preparing for nuclear war, he has few illusions about what it would mean. "Through the years, we always reacted like we could handle an all-out nuclear attack," he says. "I don't think people -- even our top people in government -- have any idea of what a thousand multimegaton nuclear weapons on the U.S. would do. We'd be back in the Stone Age. It's unthinkable...
...form of containment, part of what the Atlantic Council of the U.S., a private foreign policy study group, has termed "assertive deterrence." In its ongoing effort to oppose and restrain the Soviet Union, the U.S. must have capabilities offsetting Moscow's at every level, from % small-caliber bullets to multimegaton thermonuclear warheads; the Soviets must not be permitted a monopoly in any significant category of competition, military or paramilitary. To avoid the danger of escalation, the U.S. must have the ability to combat the Soviets and their proxies on their own turf, without resorting to higher levels of violence...
...China. He had been at the Politburo discussion. He said that Marshal Andrei Grechko, the Defense Minister, actively advocated a plan "once and for all to get rid of the Chinese threat." Grechko, a dim-witted martinet replaced by Dimitri Ustinov in 1976, called for unrestricted use of the multimegaton bomb known in the West as the "blockbuster." The bomb would release enormous amounts of radioactive fallout, not only killing millions of Chinese but threatening Soviet citizens in the Far East and people in other countries bordering China...
...Soviets fire off other missiles. But again and again, the killer beam appears almost miraculously out of the skies, destroying one rocket after another. The Kremlin is so frustrated that it calls off its multimegaton attack...
General David Jones, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fears that the Soviets might use a single multimegaton airburst over the U.S. to strike the entire nation?and its defense nerve centers?deaf, dumb and blind. Insulating the American command-and-control network against EMP, to preclude the possibility that the U.S. might be unable to fire a single shot, is one of the many