Word: blasted
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first nuclear explosion seared the pre-dawn sky over New Mexico, one awed spectator felt that he was witnessing "what the first man would have seen at that moment in creation when God said, 'Let there be light.' " To another observer, Harvard Chemistry Professor George Kistiakowsky, the blast suggested the last impression of "the last man in the last millisecond of the earth's existence." In reality, of course, the road from Alamogordo has led neither to Eden nor to Armageddon but to atomic stalemate, to a world in which the superpowers between them have ten tons...
...race unless it has a highly developed electronics and metallurgical base as well as a solid corps of expert physicists, technicians and weapons engineers. To produce four or five Hiroshima-type bombs a year, it needs a big 70-megawatt reactor and, to keep it going at full blast, 100 tons of uranium ore (which is now in oversupply throughout the world and may in time be available on the open market). This would assure the aspiring nuclear power a yearly output of some 20 kilograms of plutonium, the raw material for bombs, which reactors produce automatically as a byproduct...
Meanwhile, a team of Atomic Energy Commission investigators continues to search debris in the now roofless CEA experimental hall for clues to the cause of the mysterious blast. Most of the equipment in the hall is coated with tar that dripped from the destroyed roof...
...down an American U-2 over Cuba in 1962. They can pluck a plane from the sky at an altitude of 80,000 ft. and fully 35 miles away, riding a radar beam en route and destroying the aircraft with a proximity-fused high explosive or even a nuclear blast. Even after the rockets are mounted, U.S. pilots could take them out by sneaking in beneath the line-of-sight alert radars and slamming the concrete revetments that house the missiles with their own standoff air-to-ground birds...
Investigators are still trying to determine the exact cause of the blast. The accelerator, buried 16 ft. below ground, was not damaged, and there was no danger of radioactivity. Still, the laboratory's new bubble chamber for the study of subnuclear particles lay twisted and scorched in the $1,000,000 wreckage. When all the evidence has been studied, the deceptively simple element may yet be exonerated. But significantly, when the accident occurred, the scientists were cautiously handling hydrogen, piping it into the 100-gal. bubble chamber...