Commentary
One of the great ways of encouraging kids to read for enjoyment back in the 1970s, especially boys, was to buy them the “Guinness Book of World Records.” And along with the fascinating facts about 8-foot-11 Robert Wadlow of Alton, Illinois, and communist Russia’s Motherland statue dwarfing the Statue of Liberty (but only if you exclude Liberty’s pedestal), they would eventually find themselves reading a terrifying observation in the section on the largest man-made explosions:
“No official estimate has been published of the potential power of the device known as Doomsday, but this far surpasses any tested weapon. If it were practicable to construct, it is speculated that a 50,000-megaton cobalt-salted device could wipe out the entire human race except people who were deep underground and did not emerge for more than five years.”…