The civilization-enders were in mass production a mere 9 years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_

The civilization-enders were in mass production a mere 9 years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb Mk-17: produced Jul 1954-Nov 1955 No. built: 200 Blast yield: 15 megatonnes of TNT This is 1000 times the power of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. From 1935 to 1955 you could plot "firepower deliverable by a single aircraft" and see a trend that looks a lot like Moore's Law for mass destruction of life and structures. Edward Teller thought that it was possible to make bombs a thousand times more powerful than the first generation thermonuclear bombs, but fortunately nobody was willing to commit resources to exploring the concept. Merely testing such a bomb on Earth would have been an act of mass destruction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial_(weapon)