Word: thermonuclear
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...talk it over. Dulles suggested a preliminary exchange of views in Washington, and last week the Kremlin agreed. Two days later, the Atomic Energy Commission announced that this month "men and materials will begin moving to the Pacific proving grounds [for] weapons tests of all categories," i.e., fission and thermonuclear...
...lupine scuffle for succession in the Kremlin and opened a new and unpredictable era for the tyranny Joseph Stalin fixed on half the globe. Radioactive dust particles borne east in a cloud from Siberia told the outside world that Russia, too, had plumbed the secret of the thermonuclear bomb and could now visit instantaneous death on the obscurest cranny of civilization. Yet somehow, in the year in which he learned that a mere handful of chemicals could blast his world to smithereens, the average man of the free world seemed to conclude that the peril of general war had lessened...
...alike, seemed less the shapers of destiny than its creatures. The change in the hands which governed the two greatest powers brought a strange sense of indecisiveness to world affairs. The strain of the cold war brought hesitations and serious arguments to the Western Alliance. The dawning of the thermonuclear age, with its talk of megaton bombs (equal to 1,000,000 tons of TNT), cast great and sudden doubt on the validity of the thinking and the plans of statesmen and diplomats and soldiers. Both sides were caught in a sort of pause, to re-examine and to retool...
...implication was plain: continued delay in formation of the six-nation European Army (including twelve West German divisions) might mean withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Continent. His warning and his urgency reflect the U.S. conviction that Russian progress in atomic and thermonuclear weapons has increased, as Dulles said, in "the quality of the danger...
Smith gave a striking illustration of the atomic-thermonuclear revolution in firepower. If a one-inch cube were considered the equivalent of one ton of TNT. the average bomber load in World War II would stand four inches high; the Nagasaki-Hiroshima atomic bomb would be a 1,666-ft. column, more than three times the height of the Washington monument; the "conventional" atomic bomb of today would tower 4,998 ft. high; and the power of the thermonuclear superbomb, similarly expressed, would be represented by a column soaring 63 miles into...