Word: bomb
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...bombshell designed to impugn the President's integrity and spread distrust of him in West Germany, Khrushchev charged that the President's professed desire to see Germany reunited is insincere. Actually, said Khrushchev, the President told him that "the U.S. is afraid of building up Germany." The bomb fizzled: West Germans scoffed at the accusation, and the White House speedily denied...
...autumn of 1954, and the U.S. was hard-crashing a life-or-death program: the development of a rocket that could bellow into space, span oceans and continents, plunge down through the atmosphere and deliver an H-bomb payload anywhere on the earth...
...Naval Research Laboratory when a colleague asked him why the lab's Geiger counters had recently been clicking faster after rainstorms. King collected rain water from the roof of N.R.L.'s building, found that it was slightly radioactive, suspected that the activity came from U.S. A-bomb tests in the Pacific about six months before. To make sure, he needed rain water from just after the A-bomb tests-and that meant getting some that could be certified as almost six months old. A Navy commander recalled that in the Virgin Islands most drinking water is in fact...
...that time, the U.S. had a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and many experts believed that the Soviet Union would not break the monopoly for many years. Less confident, Peter King set up an unofficial sort of watch for Soviet A-bomb tests. He arranged to have Navy planes bring him once-a-month jugs of rain water from Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska, relatively close to the U.S.S.R. He called his low-key project Operation Rainbarrel...
Rush Message. For many months, the air over Alaska remained free of man-made radioactivity. But in September, 1949 King heard from the Air Force of indications that the Russians might have successfully tested an atomic bomb. He sent a rush message-"To hell with the monthly schedule"-for fresh rain water from Kodiak. Within a few hours, he was able to identify radioactive cerium, which could only have come from a nuclear explosion. The U.S. had had no recent A-bomb tests. There was only one possible conclusion-and a few days later, President Harry Truman announced...