Sundial (weapon)

Uncommon card · No. 87101

Sundial was the codename of one of two massive nuclear bombs proposed for testing by the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch as part of a classified American weapons project in the early 1950s. Announced in 1954 by Hungarian–American physicist Edward Teller at a meeting of the Man Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), it was intended to have a yield of 10 gigatons of TNT. If built and detonated, Sundial would have created a fireball up to 50 kilometers (30 miles) in diameter, instantly igniting everything within 400 kilometers (250 miles) and causing a magnitude 9 earthquake. It was thought that the explosion would lead to an apocalyptic nuclear winter. The Sundial bomb was never built or tested. Teller's proposal for the bomb shocked other attendees at the AEC meeting, and fellow physicist Isidor Rabi dismissed it as an "advertising stunt".

Read on Wikipedia