megaton

Yes, it's also true that "megaton" has a second meaning.

The article claims that a nine-megaton blast would wipe out "most of the state of Arkansas".

It seems like if a 1 megaton impact were occurring on Earth every 15 years people would have noticed more than seems to be the case.

When they say one megaton, do they mean total energy released during entry or something?

""It must not have occurred to the officers that the blast doors were designed to withstand a 20 megaton nuclear explosion from close range.

We used to face multi-megaton hydrogen bombs aimed at population centers.

It is, because on Mars there isn't an atmosphere there to burn up that 1 megaton asteroid into something more innocuous.

It's when you see a megaton of steel suspended over your head by a thread the thickness of a human hair that you really find God in technology.

The soviets made 10+ megaton h bombs partly because they didn't have accurate delivery systems.

The Tsar bomb was in the ballpark of a 50 megaton explosion, whereas estimates that I've seen for Krakatoa put it at up to 200 megatons.

These aren't the multi-megaton nuclear behemoths that people associate with nukes post-cold war. Those bombs are three orders of magnitude more powerful than the one shown in the picture.

Another technical mistake in the New Yorker article: it implies that since the missle was armed, the fire could have produced a megaton-sized blast.

Perhaps the "1 megaton" nomer is for what encounters our atmosphere, not necessarily what impacts our surface.

We've had launch and nuclear explosion detection satellites around the Earth for decades and we haven't detected anything like 1 megaton impact event every 15 years.

To put this in context, the Krakatoa eruption released energy roughly equivalent to a 200 megaton bomb, which is roughly four times larger than the "Tsar Bomba", an H-Bomb which is the largest nuclear weapon detonated to date.