Word: airbursts
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...Afghans split up and outflanked them. Within minutes, bullets were whizzing from all directions. Machinegun rounds churned up the dirt, Kalashnikov bullets cracked overhead and rocket-propelled grenades screamed past. One grenade tore between two troopers who were just meters apart, detonating behind them with an ear-shattering airburst. The soldiers blazed away at the Afghans, trying to stop them from reaching the high ground. Discarding their packs, the Australians headed for a small plateau about 30 m away where there was slightly more cover...
...theory makes a degree of sense. Science is usually an incremental enterprise, with most researchers toiling in the experimental thickets, trying to hack out a little clearing of enlightenment. Occasionally, however, a Darwin or Einstein comes along and with a flash of insight as blinding as a thermonuclear airburst, clears the entire landscape. Down below, ordinary scientists blink disbelievingly at their sudden ability to see from horizon to horizon. But their sense of wonder is tempered by regret. Tending your tiny patch seems like pulling weeds compared with such intellectual clear cutting...
...about Israel's intentions. At some point after Hizballah's mortar attack, two, or perhaps three, of its fighters entered the camp. That has prompted some U.N. officials to suggest privately that Israel knew exactly what it was doing: it bombed the mortar site first, then deliberately aimed the airburst shells at the compound in the hopes of nailing the fighters. Van Kappen's monograph did not go so far as to make this accusation explicit--although the U.S., which fears that the report may jeopardize a new agreement to contain the war between Israel and Hizballah, is apparently interpreting...
...suspended--to the sequence of events in The Day After. Considering the staggering amount of overkill capacity possessed by both superpowers, it can safely be concluded that no conceivable START agreement could have saved Lawrence, Kansas. The INF negotiations are even more peripheral to the story's outcome. The airburst weapons used in the movie were either bombs or rockets launched from planes, ground-launched short-range rockets, or artillery-launched weapons. Both sides possess thousands of these small devices, and they have never been the subject of bilateral negotiation...
...casually broadcast and half-heard at first. The sound track carries snatches of references that accelerate to slightly longer descrip tions of airport blockades and MiG-25s "invading West German airspace" and that end, finally, with a shocked anchorwoman saying, "Three nuclear weapons in the low-kiloton range were airburst this morning over advancing Soviet troops." There is only calamity after that. ABC's determination to keep up appearances of political evenhandedness have helped the film makers conjure up what seems like a spookily accurate scenario for Armaged don: the beginnings of worldwide disaster as a series of barely...