Science: The Deadly Dust

Atom bomb tacticians believe that the best place to explode a bomb is high above the target, where blast and heat do the most damage. Since the radioactive fission products of such "air bursts" are carried upward and dissipated harmlessly, civil defense workers, with no deadly contamination to worry about, could go straight at the problems of less subtle death and destruction.*

Last week Colonel Lawrence Wilkinson New York State's new Civil Defense boss, showed that he did not believe an enemy would necessarily be tactically orthodox in planning a bombing assault: he issued a detailed plan for detecting radioactive contamination.

Wilkinson based...

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