Megadeath

Megadeath (or megacorpse) is a term for one million deaths by nuclear explosion. The term was used by scientists and thinkers who strategized likely outcomes of all-out nuclear warfare. The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation for the term is a 1953 article from the Birmingham News, and it appears again in 1959 in the New Statesman. The term was used to refer to the "megadeath intellectuals", the group of thinkers surrounding RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn. The concept was notably discussed in Kahn's 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War.