Word: thermonuclear
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...pistol is the thermonuclear strike force of the manned bombers and fighter-bombers of the U.S. Air Force, backed up by the Navy's far-ranging carrier planes and submarines. Operating out of 270-odd air bases in a score of countries, this thermonuclear strike force is poised all day, every day, to deliver a 360° assault (see map) against the 37,500-mile borders of the Soviet Union, each single aircraft capable of unloading on target the mighty equivalent of all the bombs dropped by all nations during World War II. Unlike the Kremlin's-headline...
...force 30% more range. The Air Force has contracted for 30 test supersonic delta-wing B58 bombers for phasing in beside the medium B-473. Already SAC has its first operational intercontinental guided missile: Snark, a lumbering air-breather that cannot break the sound barrier but can dump a thermonuclear payload (as it proved in a flight test last week) on a target less than five miles in diameter at a range of 5,000 miles. A really hot Air Force prospect is Rascal, an air-to-ground missile for firing from B-47s that can hit a target...
...Clean" thermonuclear bombs, like clean small boys, do not necessarily stay clean for long. The most familiar kind of radioactive fallout comes from the fission of plutonium or uranium 235, and from the so-called clean bombs that the U.S. Government has announced contain only small amounts of these troublemaking substances. The bulk of the bomb's bang comes from fusion of hydrogen, which creates no fission products...
...bomb can be clean in one way and dirty in another. In Science, William H. Shipman and other scientists from the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, San Francisco, tell how they found large quantities of radioactive manganese 54 in the fallout from last year's thermonuclear tests at Eniwetok. Since Mn-54 is not a fission product, they concluded that it was formed when free neutrons from the explosion combined with iron or ordinary manganese, presumably in the bomb's structure. Figuring back, they estimated that "megacurie quantities" were produced...
Luis Walter Alvarez, 46, sports-jacketed professor of physics and associate director of the University of California's Radiation Laboratory, has been called the "prize wild-idea man." Some prized wild ideas: isolation of tritium (used in thermonuclear weapons) and, with a graduate student, the discovery of helium 3 (1939); the universally used radar-operated Ground-Controlled Approach System for blind-flying aircraft (1942); a method of producing nuclear reaction without the presence of uranium or million-degree heat (1956). Born in San Francisco, the son of onetime Teacher and Mayo Clinic Physician (and now medical columnist) Walter Alvarez...