Word: canavan
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...putting a standby squadron of nuclear-tipped missiles in place. Hence the latest strategy, which in some cases would obviate the need for a nuclear defense: propelling a fusillade of cannonball-size steel spheres at an approaching asteroid. In a high-velocity encounter with a speeding NEO, explains Gregory Canavan, a senior scientist at Los Alamos, "the kinetic energy of the balls would change into heat energy and blow the thing apart...
...morning after the crash, U.S. Army Brigadier General Michael Canavan phoned from Dubrovnik to inform Harold Ickes, Clinton's deputy chief of staff, that Brown's body had finally been identified. Famous for his steeliness, Ickes opened the 8:30 a.m. White House staff meeting with the grim news, then issued a call for business as usual. But within minutes he had turned the meeting into an impromptu wake, with staff members swapping fond anecdotes and roguish tales, all of them rich in laughter and full of deep pride in Brown. Even Ickes told...
...Callahan 9 (Canavan...
...that delivers most of its energy in the form of speeding neutrons rather than an explosive blast. The neutron warhead would be detonated when the missile approached to about a distance equal to the radius of the asteroid. "The neutrons penetrate deeply into the near side of the asteroid," Canavan explains. "They heat and vaporize the material, which expands at a high velocity and blows out of the side of the asteroid," thrusting it into a new, non-threatening orbit...
...anti-Star Wars scientists were not reassured. Some campaigned through last summer against even the mention of any nuclear deterrence in the final draft of the interception workshop's report. Then came word of Comet Swift-Tuttle. "Nothing so clears the mind as the sight of the gallows," quips Canavan, who oversaw the final report. "Even though Swift-Tuttle turned out to be a false alarm," he says, "it brought everyone's thinking into focus. There was no longer the kind of disagreement you saw earlier about nukes versus non-nukes." Compromises were made, and the long-delayed interception report...