When I was growing up hearing about "fallout" was always in terms of some power plant accident and exposure meant some imperceptible increase in lifetime cancer risk. Much later in life I learned that the "fallout" from a thermonuclear bomb exploding a hundred kilometers upwind could easily mean death, not of cancer in a decade but in hours or days from acute radiation sickness. It seems strange that we use the same word in both cases where in other cases our words clearly distinguish amounts by levels of danger, "falling pebble" versus "falling boulder", "raindrop" versus "flood", etc. It would be good if we could have that with radiation dangers as well.
