Word: craterous
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Ploughshare optimism is based on studies of a long series of craters blasted by both chemical and nuclear explosives in the Nevada desert. The first, called Buster Jangle-U. (1951), used a crude atom bomb with a yield of 1.2 kilotons. It dug a circular hole 53 ft. deep and 258 ft. in diameter. The next shot, Teapot-Ess, had the same yield, but it was placed deeper and it dug a deeper and wider crater. With these and other shots, Ploughshare scientists built up a body of theory and experience in which they have great confidence. Latest and largest...
...shot is placed at too shallow a depth, as Buster Jangle-U. was, it wastes most of its energy on the air. If it is too deep, it lifts a great amount of soil and broken rock, but lets most of the stuff fall back into the crater...
...first plan was pretty far out: apartment houses built of the aircraft industry's lightweight alloys, each floor hung from a huge central mast. A dirigible would carry the whole building to the selected site, then drop a bomb, plant the building's mast into the resulting crater, and buzz off-leaving a ground crew to fill in the hole around the mast with concrete...
...Force Observers James C. Greenacre and Edward M. Barr had a painstaking job: with the 24-in. telescope of the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Ariz., they were to map a part of the moon-the well-defined crater Aristarchus, 27 miles in diameter. Both men were thoroughly familiar with the crater and its vicinity; Greenacre could hardly believe his eyes when he saw two bright red spots looming to the northwest and a third just inside the crater's rim. "I had the impression that I was looking into a large, polished gem ruby," he says...
...Greenacre and Barr no time to rig apparatus and make photographs. Dr. John S. Hall, the observatory's director, reported what they had seen to astronomical authorities. He had not seen the spots himself, but he ordered a close watch kept on Aristarchus. The moon waned, throwing the crater into cold and darkness, but in late November, two days after the edge of sunlight reached Aristarchus again, Dr. Hall and four other observers saw a reddish area, twelve miles long and 1½ miles wide, inside the rim right where one of the spots had been seen in October...