Word: strontium
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Again, all praise to the editors for rejecting the flaming unilateralist approach. In this era of sifting strontium such temperance from Tocsin is truly commendable...
...sense this is fortunate: while the deadly stuff is hanging many miles above the earth, its short-lived isotopes disintegrate and virtually disappear. But two of its most dangerous constituents, strontium 90 and cesium 137, would not fade into harmlessness even if they floated in the stratosphere for a century. And fact is that few fission products stay up nearly so long...
Inexorable Climb. The stratospheric circulation has its greatest effect in late winter and early spring, and that is when the Public Health Service expects the Soviet strontium 90 and cesium 137 to fall most heavily. Most of the fallout will contaminate the temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere, where the bulk of the world's population lives...
...much of the fall-out comes from the bomb itself. When the fireball hits the ground, it activates a vast quantity of dust which is then redistributed in the upper atmosphere. This fall-out settles fairly rapidly--a week to 10 days. The material from the bomb--strontium 90 and that sort of thing, is up there much longer...
...bombs, the first of which, exploded by the U.S. in 1954, killed a Japanese fisherman by its fallout and seriously injured many people in the nearby Marshall Islands. When the Russians fol lowed with similar dirty tests, radiation increased all over the world. Especially frightening was the fallout of strontium 90, a deadly fission product that settles in bones and may cause cancer. The new Soviet test series will not necessarily scatter much-dreaded strontium 90, but radioactive products of some sort are sure to, result...