Word: arsenale
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...might get out of Kuwait one step ahead of a coalition offensive. Hence the note of frustration in Bush's voice Friday as he all but begged the Iraqi armed forces to "take matters into their own hands," thus doing what not even the smartest bomb in the U.S. arsenal has been able to accomplish...
...unlikely to do so in the gulf war. Chemicals would achieve no military advantage that cannot be attained through conventional means, and their use by the allies would compromise long-term U.S. efforts to eliminate them from the planet. The U.S. has no chemical arms in its gulf arsenal, nor does it possess any biological weapons, having unilaterally forsworn them in 1969. Should Saddam Hussein fight dirty, however, the U.S. and its allies can retaliate by using other potent weapons against Iraqi troops. Among them...
FUEL-AIR EXPLOSIVES. The deadliest non-nuclear bombs in the allied arsenal, they disperse a highly volatile mist over a large area. When this cloud is ignited in a second explosion, the resulting blast packs nearly the wallop (but, of course, not the radiation) of a small nuclear device. The bombs also suck up oxygen, pulling the lungs and other organs of stricken troops partially out of their bodies. The mist from some fuel-air bombs can penetrate bunkers before detonating. Another advantage is that while the force of a conventional explosion decreases rapidly as one moves away from...
...small irony that many of the countries that condemned Iraq's invasion of Kuwait are the very ones that filled Saddam's arsenal. Moreover, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait provided billions of the dollars that financed his weapons-buying binges. Through the '80s, communist dictators, Arab autocrats, South American generals and Western democrats alike opened their countries' weapons coffers to Saddam. The bills for his spending spree, which built Iraq into the world's fourth-ranking military power, totaled more than $50 billion -- and that figure refers only to sales of conventional weapons. Some $15 billion more went toward the covert...
Throughout, he played the international arms market deftly, aware that he could keep his foes guessing about the contents of his arsenal by avoiding one-stop shopping. The Scud missiles fired against Israel and Saudi Arabia, for instance, were bought from the Soviet Union but were upgraded with equipment and expertise purchased from other nations. France provided guidance systems, Germany and Italy improved propulsion, and Brazil assembled the parts. Iraq's underground aircraft shelters were also hybrid creations. According to European press reports, Belgians designed the shelters, Swiss provided air-filtration units, Italians blastproof doors, and Britons and Germans...