Word: bombings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...China's perimeter. Drone planes, high-flying U-2s and satellite cameras record roads, railways, steel mills, oil wells, nuclear plants, missile ranges and troop movements. U.S. Government analysts early spotted China's gaseous diffusion plant at Lanchow, the plutonium reactor at Paotow, and the atom-bomb test site at Lop Nor in the Taklamakan wastes of Sinkiang. They have predicted well in advance the timing of all three Chinese atomic explosions...
...bomb was not H. Seismographs monitoring the Chinese test site in Sinkiang province indicated a wallop of only 130 kilotons. The Atomic Energy Commission found traces of lithium 6, a thermonuclear material right enough, but the major element in the explosion was enriched uranium-the same as in Peking's two earlier tests. China's first H-bomb will probably be a triple-stage fission-fusion-fission monster of the same "dirty" quality as the giant Khrushchevian 40-megaton bombs that were exploded prior to the 1963 test ban. Those bombs are too big to be delivered...
Nabokov's original translation in 1937 fell upon an indifferent market (he had yet to write Lolita, which was to make him famous). Most of the copies of Despair remained in the London publisher's custody; in 1940 a Luftwaffe bomb reduced them to confetti. Nabokov explains all this in a foreword to this revised translation-also his own -and enters his usual caveat against reading anything into the book that isn't there: "Despair, in kinship with the rest of my books, has no social comment to make, no message to bring in its teeth...
Back at their computers, other scientists of Sandia determined that the radioactive contamination of Spanish soil had been caused entirely by the two recovered bombs that had broken apart on impact. Had another bomb shattered on land, the level of radio activity would have been higher. Thus the scientists assumed that either the missing bomb had not broken apart on hitting land, or it had fallen into the sea. Further ballistics analysis and wind data enabled the Sandia computers eventually to plot the probable trajectory of the missing bomb and locate where it had hit the water. Their calculations tended...
Precarious Perch. Late in February, when the final information from Palo mares had been processed by the computers, Sandia scientists traced a square on a Spanish coastal chart and said, "Tell Alvin (the deep-diving research submarine that eventually found the bomb) to look here." Three weeks later, when the little sub finally located the missing bomb-2,500 feet below the surface, still shrouded in its parachute and perched precariously on a 70° slope-it was 1,200 yards from the final coordinates calculated in a laboratory over 5,000 miles away...