"Is it...ATOMIC???" "Yes, sir! VERY Atomic!"
Ah, those were the days---when the Cold War infiltrated our pop culture!
The other day you posted:
Since I grew up during the Cold War, there was a proliferation of movies about things that went awry after being contaminated by radiation or something equally as evil. Things that grew big or mutated into something horrific. I went through all the "duck and cover" drills and these films seemed to contain the nugget of a possibility that maybe this could happen, so that made them scary to me
I meant to comment that, as silly as "duck and cover" might have seemed, it was really an effective self-defense mechanism to use against a non-direct atomic explosion of the World War II size (20Kilotons or so). However, after Bikini and the H-Bomb, all bets were off. One does not duck and cover from a near-hit by a 10,000 Kiloton bomb!
The Good News about H-Bombs is that there is very little radioactive fallout (they are fusion weapons which generate heat and blast energy, not radiation; there is a tiny bit of fallout generated by the A-Bomb used as the H-Bomb's trigger, however.)
From a weapons development point of view, radio-active fallout was always a problem! In most battle-field scenarios, the intent is not to simply deny the enemy the territory, but to claim it for one's own. We spent years developing "tactical nuclear weapons" - smallish, fairly clean, warheads that could be used to clean a target of enemy forces but render it safe for re-occupation shortly thereafter. A-Bombs have always gotten a bum rap: A-Bomb attacks on Japan were not as devastating as the fire bombing of Toyko (and not as grim as the fire-bombing of Dresden). It is their efficiency that makes them frightening. When a
middle aged warrior warriors from the middle ages left acres of land strewn with body parts, and towns burned to the ground, and fields destroyed for years, history hardly noticed. But had the same carnage and devastation been the result of one wave of a Wizard's wand, it would still be remembered as an Event of the Century!.
der Brucer (suspecting that he will have difficulty selling a topic entitled "The Socital Considerations of Effective Nuclear Weapon Development and Deployment")
