Word: commandant
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After Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, 67, was abruptly removed last September as chief of the Soviet general staff, he was variously reported to be in charge of a military academy or a command in the western U.S.S.R. Some analysts interpreted the ouster as a rebuke to a strong-willed career soldier who refused to tailor his views to prevailing political sentiment. Ogarkov's call to intensify the development of nonnuclear weaponry and his public hectoring of the U.S. had apparently put him at odds with the ruling Politburo's aging members. But Communist Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev has been making...
...gone on for two years. During the talking at Panmunjom, tens of thousands of people were being killed. He had said, 'I will go to Korea,' in our campaign, and he was one of those new politicians who believed he had to keep a promise. Mark Clark was in command. Clark, knowing that Eisenhower did not want to get involved in an expanded ground war in Korea, understood that the only option for breaking the logjam was nuclear weapons...
...connected "capsules," rooms shaped like medicine capsules; one is the equipment room, the other, sealed behind an 8'/2-ton blast door, is the room where a two-man crew, sitting at two separate "status consoles," receives messages and stares at boards of lights. On June 6 this year, the command crew was 1st Lieut. Donald R. ("Skip") MacKinnon, 32, and 1st Lieut. Stephen J. Griffin, 24. June 6 was an atypically busy day for them because the launching codes were being changed, as they are periodically. A Diet Pepsi can rested on one of the consoles. Five miles away from...
...President were to begin launch procedures, he would signal the Strategic Air Command headquarters near Omaha, which would send messages with an "enabling code" to places like Tango Zero. The enabling code allows the missiles to be unlocked. MacKinnon and Griffin then open a red metal box containing a book that verifies the code received, along with two small keys. The six-figure code is dialed into a machine, and the missile's "safety" removed. Standing 12 ft. apart, the two crewmen then turn their keys within no more than 1.5 sec. of each other (it is impossible...
...President Richard Nixon. "He might seem an odd choice," says Rosenblatt, "but he has a historian's mind and an extraordinary understanding of the world since the 1940s. And for 14 of the 40 years since Hiroshima, he had the authority to use nuclear weapons or was second in command...