Word: detect
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...night in June 1984, a test ICBM soared up from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Thousands of miles away in the middle of the Pacific, another rocket was launched on Kwajalein Island. It contained an infrared sensor powerful enough to detect heat from a human body 1,000 miles away. Closing at 15,000 m.p.h., the rocket locked onto the ICBM, intercepting it in midflight and destroying it by sheer physical impact. So devastating was the hit that the remaining shards of the ICBM's warhead measured less than an inch across...
COURTROOM CARNAGE Federal judges have been so jittery about courthouse crime that since the early '80s, most federal courts have been outfitted with airport-style X-ray machines, designed to detect concealed weapons. Even so, the bloodletting continues. On Aug. 6, a man scheduled to be sentenced for drug dealing stormed the federal courthouse in Topeka, Kansas, firing two guns . and lobbing pipe bombs. Before Jack McKnight, 37, killed himself by detonating explosives strapped to his body, he killed a security guard and wounded five people. "There's now a tacit assumption that people can vent their frustrations almost anywhere...
...crime is hugely profitable and very difficult to detect," says Bucks County prosecutor Carolyn Oliver. "Wills' million-dollar ring is the biggest we've ever seen here, but it's just the tip of the iceberg." Salvage yards and body shops across the country will pay illegal suppliers like Wills $5,000 total for the front end, back clip, engine, radio, doors and bumpers of a typical late-model car. The parts are then resold to insurance companies, marked up 200% to 300% of their black-market cost. Last year 40,000 cars were stolen in the Philadelphia area alone...
...transmitter and stop the car dead. Among the newer devices on the market are electronic tracking systems like LoJack and Teletrac, which cost between $500 and $750 and allow police to track stolen vehicles with an electronic signal. But thieves have already come up with devices that can detect whether a car is sending out a tracking signal, allowing them to pass up such cars or locate the tracking device and disarm...
Husbanding Resources. Intelligence is still, for most countries, primarily an early-warning system. It must detect preparations for military attacks, the development of threatening nuclear or chemical weapons, or in the case of the former Soviet Union, any illicit movement of nuclear warheads and strategic missiles. In the U.S. that means the intelligence arsenal must include satellites carrying high-resolution cameras and electronic eavesdropping devices. Such systems are extremely expensive. Most of the money in the annual budget, says former CIA chief Gates, "goes to sustaining the infrastructure, especially of the satellites, the worldwide, day-to-day coverage from space...