Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...villages, reported: "The western territories are the rawest, most livid scar on the face of Europe. During an eight-hour drive to Wroclaw we saw only eight passenger cars on the highways. In Police, amid the monumental shards of one of the Nazis' biggest synthetic-oil centers, the earth still reeks of explosives and soaked oil. Every week children are killed or maimed by unexploded mines or bombs in the rubble...
Arching Lines. Project Argus began with a suggestion from Nicholas Constantine Christofilos, 42, a remarkable engineer-scientist of limited academic training but highly original ideas. For centuries, scientists have known that the earth behaves as if it had a great bar magnet inside it; lines of magnetic force make compass needles point to the magnetic north and south poles. As magnetic theory developed, scientists realized that the lines of force must arch high above the atmosphere. More than 50 years ago they began to speculate on how charged particles such as electrons would behave in the vacuum of space near...
Late in 1957 Christofilos (see below) became convinced that high-speed electrons released above the earth's atmosphere would be trapped by the magnetic field and circulate in complicated paths for a considerable time. When Dr. James A. Van Allen discovered shortly afterward by means of the Army's Explorer satellites that such a radiation belt actually existed and conformed to the predicted magnetic contours, the Christofilos suggestion looked even more reasonable. But no one knew whether man could produce enough electrons to affect the whole earth or whether they would prove, in the words of one scientist...
Racing Particles. Since a good source of electrons is atom bombs, which give off vast swarms of them, military authorities realized quickly that rocket-borne atom bombs, exploded at the proper altitude over the proper part of the earth, would test peaceful magnetic theories while giving answers to military problems. e.g., the possible use of atomic charges exploded above the atmosphere as a defense against ballistic missiles. When an atom bomb explodes in the atmosphere, its fireball stops expanding when its pressure falls to that of the air around it; in the vacuum above the atmosphere, the fireball expands indefinitely...
Christofilos now works on his fusion reactor, which he calls the Astron, at super-secret Livermore Laboratory in the green hills southeast of Berkeley. His idea of trapping electrons in the earth's magnetic field grew out of Astron, which is designed to trap ionized particles in a magnetic field in a laboratory rather than on a global scale. Nick's paper proposing Project Argus, written in late 1957, was not published except in classified form, and not all scientists agree that it was the first such proposal. Professor Fred Singer of the University of Maryland is said...