Word: bombs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...reason for the caution: an emotional debate over the bomb that has gone on for months on both sides of the Atlantic. Opponents maintain that the weapon is immoral because it destroys people but not property; the argument, of course, overlooks the fact that existing tactical nuclear warheads are also intended to kill people. More to the point, opponents believe that the neutron bomb's limited blast and short-lived radiation would invite its use in a crisis, thus increasing the danger of a conventional conflict escalating into a nuclear holocaust. But, as supporters note, NATO is a defensive...
...mind in private. On occasion he does not follow the advice of even his most senior assistants, as he showed when he made his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea. This time Carter went partly along with his advisers' recommendations. He postponed production of the bomb but gave a go-ahead for work on the Lance missile and artillery shell that will deliver...
What happens next depends mostly on Bonn and Moscow. Carter has flatly ruled out producing the bomb until West Germany agrees publicly to let the weapon be installed on its territory. Because of the bomb's importance to West Germany's defense, Bonn is expected to come around eventually. At the same time, according to a White House adviser, the decision "puts the monkey back on the Russians' back. Now we are giving them a chance to give us something real. If they do nothing, we'll end up with neutron warheads in Germany...
...Linguistic purists in the Pentagon insist that the neutron bomb is a warhead and not a bomb at all, but many military experts classify shells, warheads and other explosive weapons that come down on the enemy from the air as bombs. The word derives from the Greek bombos, meaning a deep hollow sound. In the earliest known use of the word in English, an anonymous translator of a Spanish treatise described in 1588 how the Chinese used "many bomes of fire, full of olde iron and arrowes made with powder & fire worke, with the which they do much harme...
...sort of a mini-hydrogen bomb," says Weapons Analyst Samuel T. Cohen of the so-called neutron bomb. Cohen should know. In the late 1950s, as a Rand Corp. consultant to the Air Force, he was the first to draw the military's attention to the possibility of making a new type of nuclear weapon. It would do the bulk of its damage not by heat or concussive force, but by a flood of high-energy subatomic particles called neutrons. Cohen, who has no academic credentials beyond a bachelor's degree from U.C.L.A., wanted to create a relatively...