Word: downwinders
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...ample time to douse his own spinnaker. Never for a moment did he really stop racing. With his light hull and yawl rig, Nick Geib could hoist plenty of canvas, and the race was a spinnaker run most of the way. He never hesitated to use that tricky tactic, downwind tacking. "We like to tack downwind," says he. "We keep her footing that way." Whenever the wind shifted a few degrees. Geib jibed, kept running dead before the breeze. The skipper had only one complaint: "During the last leg, every time I took the helm, the wind would die." Unwilling...
...seconds it glows like a meteor, trailing a bright streak of flame. Then out of the sea rises a dome of fire 20 miles across. The sea boils as if a volcano had poked through the crust of the earth, and a cloud of radioactive death drifts downwind. An earth wave jangles seismographs in San Francisco, St. Louis, New York, Madrid...
...barrel" to be effective. A T-N (thermonuclear) warhead in the megaton range (equivalent to millions of tons of TNT) would blot out a large city even if it exploded well outside the city's limits, and its radioactive fallout would have a killing effect a long way downwind. So the ICBM, besides being fairly small, might be fairly inaccurate and still do its job. For it, a C.E.P. (circular error of probability) of five miles would be good enough. And the cataclysmic effect of the great warhead made almost any cost of the missile well worth spending...
Racing yachtsmen who have made the long, downwind thrash from California to Hawaii are convinced that the trans-Pacific race is the toughest test of men and ships yet devised. Sail, rigging, hull and nerves are strained to the breaking point as crews drive their craft before the northeasterly trade winds over most of the 2,225 miles of open sea between San Pedro and Honolulu...
Cigar-Shaped Peril. In the Pacific last March, the hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll sent a shower of deadly radioactive dust (mostly pulverized coral) over a vast cigar-shaped area extending 220 miles downwind from the blast. Along a strip up to 20 miles wide, extending 140 miles downwind, the fall-out-if it had come down in a populated area-would have seriously threatened the lives of nearly every human. At a distance of 160 miles the lives of half the people would be threatened; at 190 miles 5% to 10% might die (varying with individual reaction...