Word: bombing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Talent for Controversy. Sometime Wall Street banker, longtime member (1946-50) and chairman (1953-58) of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis L. Strauss made a lot of enemies during his AEC years in the controversies that swirled about him: his winning fight to get an H-bomb program started, the lifting of Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance, the Dixon-Yates electric-power contract with AEC. But weighed calmly against his long record of achievement, going back 42 years to his service as secretary to Food Administrator Herbert Hoover in World War I, Strauss's talent...
Teak was the name of the first of two high-altitude H-bombs set off by the U.S. over the Pacific near Johnston Island last summer. Lifted 40 miles above the earth by a Redstone missile, the bomb was detonated a few minutes before midnight. Out of the blackness came a fireball that grew to eleven miles in width in less than half a second and could be seen in Hawaii, 700 miles to the northeast. Its multicolored aurora was observed 3,000 miles away in Samoa. Some nights later a similar device, called Orange, was fired from 20 miles...
...electromagnetic effects of the blasts showed that the upper atmosphere was so disturbed by ionizing radiation "that some radio waves were absorbed or scattered" for hours afterward. Result: communications were upset or blacked out over an area "at least" 3,000 miles in diameter. Obvious conclusion: a megaton bomb exploded high overhead just ahead of an all-out missile attack could disrupt vital defense communications for a few crucial hours...
...Isly were as thick as ever; most Europeans looked upon the wreckage and passed by, as if it had simply been a ghastly accident. And this changed attitude is not all on the European side. A month before, a terrorist was spotted before he could explode a bomb in a crowded square; he fled with a mob in hot pursuit, and was caught and nearly killed as people banged his skull against a wall. Remarkably, most of the mob were Moslems...
Pomeroy and Sutton are guarded about the effect their filters will have on international networks for detecting underground nuclear tests. They calculate that six stations equipped with the new instruments could detect most underground disturbances anywhere on earth that have the energy of a "nominal" (20-kiloton) nuclear bomb. Between 20 and 50 stations (v. the presently postulated 180) would be required not only to detect but also locate such disturbances. They are not prepared to estimate just how many more would be required to detect explosions of bombs as small as 5 kilotons or how accurately they could distinguish...