Word: bombs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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More recently, Vance privately displayed some uncustomary anger in the neutron bomb flap. He "went through five roofs," reports an aide, when other advisers pressured Carter to counter a partly inaccurate New York Times report that the President had decided against production of the weapon by immediately announcing that he had resolved only to postpone production. Vance argued for a week's delay in which to brief affected NATO allies. He was given only a few days, but it was time enough to get out advance word and limit the diplomatic damage...
...retrospect, it is easy to see why Cohen and his colleagues were fascinated by such a device. At the time, there was a growing revulsion against contamination by radioactive debris from extremely "dirty" nuclear tests in the atmosphere. Also, a low-yield bomb fitted in neatly with the limited-war concepts that were then being explored by the Eisenhower Administration. Some Pentagon strategists wanted to include in their nuclear arsenal a relatively small weapon that could be used tactically by troops in the field against a potential aggressor without causing incalculable havoc among civilian populations...
...nuclear weapons, of course, kill by heat, concussive force and radiation. But when their yield is reduced, as in the neutron bomb, the balance changes. In the words of Herbert Scoville Jr., a former weapons specialist for the Pentagon and CIA: "The instantaneous nuclear radiation, first gamma rays, then neutrons, become predominant, and the blast thermal effects become less and less important." As a result, if a typical bomb of this sort is exploded 500 ft. above the target, the blast and heat effects extend only about 400 yds. from ground zero, but the high-energy neutrons, hurtling...
...strangely appropriate that this barbed play of ideas is being presented in Columbia University's Havemayer Hall, where some of the physicists whose equations produced the atomic bomb once lectured. The cast is able, and Luckinbill is imposing as the skeptic son of rationalism. This is an auspicious debut for the New York Actors' Theater...
President Carter is a "victim of historical circumstances," and is not personally responsible for the problems which still beset the nation 15 months after he took office, Brokaw said. However, Brokaw said, his handling of the neutron bomb controversy was "amateurish...