Word: 55s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...tractors just keep coming around the corner of Mulberry and Main in downtown Wilmington, Ohio, a sputtering battalion of Oliver Super 55s, McCormick Farmalls and Minneapolis Molines--the stars of the Clinton County Corn Festival's 1997 parade. Families line the sidewalks, children wave to the farmers as they pass, but after 20 minutes Kathy Wiley has seen enough. A sylphlike executive secretary at Warner Bros. in Burbank, Calif., Wiley, 31, switches off her videocamera and wrinkles her nose at her husband Jim, who is busy snapping photos...
Military experts at first estimated that the M-55s were safe until 1986, but a '93 Army report suggests the danger zone could be reached in 1997. Several years ago, the Army simulated a single auto-ignition using real rockets filled with fake sarin. The weapons close to the smoldering rocket exploded, blowing the heavy door off the igloo and allowing rockets to fly out, spewing fake sarin into the air. Inside the igloo, rockets kept detonating with dull thuds. A typical igloo contains 4,000 M-55s, each with a seven-mile range and 20 tons of sarin...
...Army fears that 10,000 M-55s may be leaking internally right now. The 1,500 rockets with external leaks have been put into strong steel tubes. And when those containers have sprung leaks, the Army has put them into even bigger containers. This process, an Army report dryly notes, "cannot continue indefinitely." The Army recently launched a $4.5 million study to nail down a more precise deadline for the rockets' safe storage. It hopes to have an answer later this year...