Word: thermonuclear
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...apocalyptic vision of a thermonuclear war that would annihilate mankind has, in fact, slowly receded, giving way to the idea, voiced by Winston Churchill back in 1950, that the frightfulness of nuclear weapons makes total war improbable. Peace "through mutual terror." Churchill called it. A corollary of this concept is that in a nuclear stalemate the threat of nuclear retaliation ceases to be an effective deterrent to small-scale aggression with conventional weapons. In other words, nuclear stalemate can deter big wars but not little wars. To lessen the U.S.'s reliance on what the late John Foster Dulles...
...atomic bomb the size of the ones used over Japan. Another booklet begins, "Remember grandma's pantry, its shelves loaded with food, ready for any emergency, whether it be unexpected company or roads blocked for days by a winter's storm?" Needless to say, the analogy between a thermonuclear warhead and winter storm is a poor one. And the literature is simply dripping with pictures showing a happy family scene where the mother, father, and two children are enjoying life in their family shelter, oblivious to the fallout and the odors emitted by their disposal containers. The integrity...
Limiting the Consequences. McNamara has a curious theory that the U.S. and Russia, even if they come to thermonuclear blows, might limit their strikes to strategic military installations and avoid 'blasts against major population centers: "It would certainly be in their interest as well as ours to try to limit the terrible consequences of a nuclear exchange...
...Strategic Air Command bombers return to their bases. But wait! One six-bomber squadron is heading past its fail-safe point toward Moscow! Something horrible has gone wrong! A little electronic device in one of the U.S.'s billion-dollar, foolproof, fail-safe machines is on the fritz. Thermonuclear war is about to start by mistake. The President of the U.S. calls Khrushchev on the hot line to Moscow. To convince Khrush that the U.S. intended no aggressive action, he promises to order New York City obliterated, tit for tat. Khrush is agreeable. Moscow goes boom. New York goes...
...atomic attack is launched against the U.S., the U.S. will not necessarily unleash all of its thermonuclear power in return. The Kennedy Administration contends that power could be used selectively "so that there will be a way to stop a war before all of the destruction of which both sides are capable has been wrought." One byproduct of this theory is that it should ease the deep U.S. dread-as demonstrated by the bestselling success of the novel Fail-Safe-that such a war could start by mistake...