Gridiron hero of Vietnam
QUESTION Were any ice hockey, American football, baseball or basketball stars killed in the Vietnam War?
AMERICAN football stars Bob Kalsu and Don Steinbrunner, and nine Minor League baseball players, were killed while serving in Vietnam.
James Robert Kalsu was born on April 13, 1945, in Oklahoma. By the time he graduated from high school, the 6ft 3in Kalsu was the most dominant offensive guard in the state.
He played college football for Oklahoma State University, where he excelled, and was snapped up by the professional Buffalo Bills in New York.
Kalsu had been a member of the university Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programme and, after graduating, was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Following the Buffalo Bills’ 1968 season, he was called up to served in Vietnam.
Professional athletes could be excused from active duty, but Kalsu refused, telling his friends and family: ‘I’m no better than anybody else.’
When he went to Vietnam, Kalsu had an infant daughter, Jill, and his wife, Jan, had just found out she was pregnant with their second child.
In November 1969, he was stationed at Firebase Ripcord in South Vietnam’s Thua Thien-Hue province, one of the most active battle areas.
On July 21, 1970, he was killed in action when his unit came under enemy 82mm mortar fire. Two days later, his son, James Robert Todd Kalsu Jr, was born.
Donald Thomas Steinbrunner was born on April 5, 1932, in Bellingham, Washington. He was captain of the football and basketball teams at Washington State College and was selected as offensive tackle for the Cleveland Browns in 1953.
He left his professional football career in 1954 after only eight games to concentrate on his U.S. Air Force career as a navigator.
Major Steinbrunner’s plane, a C-123 Provider, was shot down by small arms fire on July 20, 1967, while spraying Agent Orange on the Vietnamese jungle, killing all five crewmen aboard. He was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
S. P. Kenny, Leeds.
QUESTION What was the most powerful bomb ever tested?
BETWEEN 1961 and 1962, the Soviet Union conducted the five most powerful nuclear tests in history.
By far the greatest of these was the Tsar Bomba or King of Bombs. This was the nickname of RDS-220, also called Big Ivan, a massive thermonuclear bomb detonated in a test over Novaya Zemlya island in the Arctic Ocean on October 30, 1961.
A deliberate display of Soviet strength, the 25-ton bomb had an enormous 100megaton capacity.
The potential blast size and fallout was considered too dangerous, so it was modified to yield 50 megatons. This was 3,800 times the strength of Little Boy, the U.S. bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II.
When Tsar Bomba was dropped from a converted Tu-95 bomber, it obliterated an abandoned village 34 miles away and generated a 5.25 magnitude earthquake.
The mushroom cloud breached the stratosphere to reach 37 miles, six times the flying height of commercial aircraft.
It was never considered for operational use, but was a propaganda weapon. Given its size, it could not be deployed by a ballistic missile. The bomb had to be transported by conventional aircraft, so the danger was that it could be intercepted before reaching its target.
Test #219 had a yield of 24,200 kilotons and a destructive radius of 25 miles — half that of Tsar Bomba.
In 1962, the USSR conducted 78 nuclear tests, including the third, fourth and fifth most powerful explosions in history. Tests #147, #173 and #174 each yielded 20,000 megatons.
The sixth largest bomb was Castle Bravo, the first of the American Castle Operation series. It was the most powerful nuclear bomb tested by the U.S., yielding a 15,000 megaton blast.
The test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific contaminated 7,000 square miles.
Dr Ken Bristow, Glasgow.
QUESTION Is the gympie-gympie tree the most dangerous plant on earth?
IT’S the most painful plant to touch, but there are many other plants that are lethal if ingested.
Dendrocnide moroides, known as the gympie-gympie, stinging tree or Queensland stinger, a plant in the nettle family, is found in rainforests of Malaysia and Australia, but it is the Queensland variation that is notorious for its extremely painful and long-lasting sting.
The plant is covered in silica hairs that act like hypodermic needles. If touched, they inject a neurotoxin, similar to that found in poisonous spiders and cone snails, which causes excruciating pain that can last for months, but is unlikely to cause death.
Oleander is known for its striking flowers, but if eaten, can cause vomiting, diarrhoea, heart arrhythmia, seizures, coma and death.
Its toxins are so strong people have become ill after eating honey made by bees that visited the flowers.
Widely grown as an ornamental, the castor bean is a plant native to Africa. While the processed seeds are the source of castor oil, they contain ricin, a poison that’s lethal in very small doses.
Rosary Pea (Abrus precatorius), used for beads in jewellery and rosaries, contains abrin, which causes organ failure.
Tobacco, the world’s most widely grown commercial non-food plant, contains carcinogens which, through smoking, have claimed millions of lives. Rachel Jacobs, Painswick, Glos.
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