What is "megaton"

Usage examples of "megaton".

The planet flickered on his screen, bursts of five hundred megaton thermonuclear warheads, clad with strontium, detonating high up in the atmosphere, destroying yet another world.

Our estimates, which are still being refined, are that this will require placement of forty warheads with an average yield of twenty megatons each over the entire earthward face of the asteroid.

AMNAT and SOVWAR usually end up with about 400 total megatons each, with the rest inconsistently divided.

The MRI designers had been deeply concerned no one be reminded of the endless megatons of rock overhead, of the fact that this grand, well-lit place was in reality an artificial cave deep in the Earth.

The better part of two megatons larger, massively armored, without the hatch-studded flanks of a CLAC.

A long way below the suited man, at the center of whatever convoluted orbital path his body was now following, Avalon still rolled on about its business, gobbling megatons of infalling dust and gas, not in the least perturbed by whatever nearby antics some microscopic beings and machines might be up to.

What he ran into, though, was more than he had counted on-a couple of megatons more.

As soon as man stopped adding his megatons of filth to the atmosphere each day, he thought, the atmosphere had reverted to what it must have been long ago, moister weather summer and winter, more stars than he had ever seen before, and more, it seemed, each night than the night before: the sky a clear, endless blue by day, velvet blue-black at night with blazing stars that modern man had never seen.

We have twelve Pluto-class atomic-powered cruise missiles pointed at that thing, day and night, as many megatons as the entire Minuteman force.

Let us ignore, for a moment, the gigaton gigantism of present-day arsenals and reflect on what a single megaton could do: it could visit Hiroshima-scale destruction on every state capital in America, with about thirty bombs to spare.

One day I asked the major how many megatons would have to be contained in the warhead of an antimissile missile in order to guarantee interception of aa SS9 missile with multiple warheads.

As nuclear weapons went, it was the veriest bagatelle compared to the five megaton monsters already developed by both the United States and Russia, developing barely one-thousandth of the explosive power of those and hardly capable of devastating more than a square mile of territory.

All the bombs dropped on all the cities in World War II amounted to some two million tons, two megatons, of TNT - Coventry and Rotterdam, Dresden and Tokyo, all the death that rained from the skies between 1939 and 1945: a hundred thousand blockbusters, two megatons.

The unionized professors and the unionized support staff and the meccano the scientists and doctors demand, all cost megatons of money, and how does the Alma Mater get it?

Washington was devastating your economy more effectively than we could have done with thousands of megatons.