In this segment, we profile one Air Force Major who asked that question back in the 1970s and learn how the very act of asking it was so dangerous it derailed his career. We also pick up the question ourselves and pose it to veterans both high and low on the nuclear chain of command. Their responses reveal once and for all whether there are any legal checks and balances between us and a phone call for Armageddon.

Radiolab Nukes

On the morning of August 6th, 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a work trip. He was walking to the office when the first atomic bomb was dropped about a mile away. He survived, and eventually managed to get himself onto a train back to his hometown ... Nagasaki. The very next morning, as he tried to convince his boss that a single bomb could destroy a whole city, the second bomb dropped. Sam Kean, whose latest book The Violinist's Thumb scrutinizes the mysteries of our genetic code, tells Jad and Robert the incredible story of what happened to Tsutomu, explains how gamma rays shred DNA, and helps us understand how Tsutomu sidestepped a thousand year curse.Then, we sit on the other side of the table and look at the protocol behind the country the dropped the bombs: President Richard Nixon once boasted that at any moment he could pick up a telephone and - in 20 minutes - kill 60 million people. Such is the power of the US President over the nations nuclear arsenal. But what if you were the military officer on the receiving end of that phone call? Could you refuse the order? In this segment, we profile one Air Force Major who asked that question back in the 1970s and learn how the very act of asking it was so dangerous it derailed his career. We also pick up the question ourselves and pose it to veterans both high and low on the nuclear chain of command. Their responses reveal once and for all whether there are any legal checks and balances between us and a phone call for Armageddon.

Radiolab.

Forces the health-physics mavens to take several more ganders at the Probabilities of alll gamma et al exposures:
from daily, tiny doses all-a-Integrating and onto larger/spike events.
('course too, ya need some forensics of his exact placement+barriers intervening: to get at least a guesstimate of what he has adsorbed.)

I recall reading the* I Demur* of a physicist way-back in early '60s (began with a 'W' -Wahl IIRC?)) while traveling on a train in Euro, as he attempted to direct attention to
our Iggerance of lifetime-effects of such cumulative, persistent dosages. He received the expected tribal dudgeon of the Experts du jour,
Science possessing no immunity to such pedestrian groupthink, we see*.

* cf. Boltzmann's Atom [David LIndley], for one.. (Thanx Scott, for that tip.)