Word: tritium
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...increase the intensity of X rays produced by a nuclear explosion, physicists can reduce the amount of uranium 238 in the outer layer of ABM warheads and add more tritium, which raises the temperature of the blast, to the fissionable material. As a result, nearly 80% of the energy released by the explosion of the new warheads, believed to be in the one-megaton range, is in the form of high-energy X rays. To extend the lethal range of these rays, which are quickly absorbed or attenuated when traveling through air, the ABM warhead will be carried high above...
...next detonation, now scheduled for Bastille Day, July 14, is likely to be relatively low-powered, as was the first. After that will come at least four higher-yield explosions, including the firing of devices laced with lithium and tritium, as important experiments toward ultimately developing the H-bomb. At one of the final explosions in late summer will be a very important guest. De Gaulle plans to stop off for a brief visit at the Polynesian site during his trip to Southeast Asia...
Before the first H-bomb was exploded, there were only a few pounds of tritium-a triple-weight, radioactive form of hydrogen-in the atmosphere and in all the world's seas. By the end of 1962, when the Russians and the U.S. had ended their atmospheric testing, the tritium released by H-blasts had increased the total to about 600 Ibs. The proliferation of the relatively harmless isotope has been of little concern to most laymen and scientists, but it has enabled University of Miami Chemist Gote Ostlund to draw an important conclusion about hurricanes: instead of getting...
Ostlund's findings, which he reported last week to a Miami conference on tropical oceanography, were derived from samples of water vapor he collected in September during harrowing "hurricane hunter" plane flights through Betsy, the storm that ravaged the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Though the amount of tritium in atmospheric water vapor over the central Atlantic and the Caribbean is usually from eight to ten times the quantity in sea water, the concentration in the samples Ostlund collected decreased as the plane approached the storm center. In the vapor in the cloud wall surrounding the storm...
Only one conclusion seemed plausible to Ostlund: the decrease in tritium in his samples resulted from the dilution of atmospheric vapor with relatively tritium-free vapor drawn up from the sea. For every ounce of atmospheric vapor in Hurricane Betsy, he calculated, there were almost two ounces of sea water vapor-a finding that strongly suggested Betsy had derived about 60% of her energy from...