Word: thermonuclear
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...most depressing of all is the reaction, or lack of it, of Majority America to the events of this decade. The technocracy has ravaged the natural environment, created an unspeakable thermonuclear arsenal, etc., and hasn't eliminated a single big problem-not even poverty, which it could eliminate easily. Yet most Americans remain convinced that our individual and societal problems are still basically technical, that science and government will solve them, that they need only keep the radical troublemakers from making more troubles and defer all power to the experts, the men on top who know best. (After all, they...
...have to impress people in the Defense Department who didn't expect to be impressed by anything that the behavioral scientists and their ARPA friends could come up with. Specifically that meant John Foster, the Defense Department's top research official. Foster's scientific work has been concerned with thermonuclear bombs (he did his graduate work under Edward Teller), and while Cambridge's behavioral scientists seem to like Foster personally (he is something of a Strangelovian cowboy, with a fondness for zooming around at the controls of his own jet plane), it is very clear that Foster puts his faith...
...falls within the Soviet or Eastern Bloc territory the United States had decided not to inform the Russians of what had happened. "The basis of this decision was the prediction that a Russian plague would kill between two and five million people, while combined Soviet-American losses from a thermonuclear exchange involving both first-and second-strike capabilities would come to more than two hundred and fifty million persons." Although most of the scientists' attention is centered on the Arizona desert, Michael Crichton, often unwittingly so, makes you wonder where the real disease really lies...
Celebrating Mao Tse-tung's 75th birthday, Communist China exploded its second successful thermonuclear device...
Nixon also left one important and familiar question begging: When the stockpiles of both powers already ensure a massive overkill, why should the U.S. add to its thermonuclear hoard in or der to convince any potential enemy that all-out warfare would signify immediate devastation? Nixon's view is that keeping ahead of the Soviets in a nuclear race would ensure peace by demonstrating that the U.S. had not turned soft...