Word: kwajaleins
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...sleepy lagoon of Eniwetok. It is the habitat of strange "birds" with peculiar names-Samos, Discoverer. Midas, Nike-Zeus-whose flights are scratched across the sky in weird contrails and tracked by missile-watching machines on a California mud flat and in such far-flung outposts as Alaska, Hawaii, Kwajalein and Christmas Island. The PMR-for Pacific Missile Range-is the nation's largest testing and training ground for missiles and space apparatus...
When a missile plunges into ZAR's range, it will reflect radar pulses back to Kwajalein. Waiting to detect them is a 1,400 ton Luneberg lens, an assembly of foamed plastic cubes containing metal threads, which will concentrate the reflected radar energy like a magnifying glass. The lens rotates in time with ZAR on a massive thrust bearing, and is housed in a plastic sphere 100 ft. in diameter...
...stage Nike Zeus rocket. All this will be automatic, and it will happen too quickly for human hand or brain to follow. To complicate the procedure still further, the Army's scientists expect the various radars to raise such an electronic racket that stand ard communication signals from Kwajalein will be drowned out. Radio messages for the outside world will first pass through a submarine cable, then be put on the air at comparatively quiet Gugeegue island...
Moment of Truth. The intricate Nike Zeus base on Kwajalein is now close to completion. Its effectiveness against long-range missiles will soon be tested with electronic tapes-flight recordings of rockets fired from Cape Canaveral down the South Atlantic range. Played over and over again, the tapes will provide plenty of practice in "intercepting" intercontinental missiles. Then there will be tests against comparatively small rockets lobbed toward Kwajalein from Roi-Namur island about 50 miles away...
Some time in 1962 will come the moment of truth: a real Atlas will be fired toward Kwajalein from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. If all goes according to plan, the speeding speck in space will be detected many hundred miles away, and its course will be calculated. A Nike Zeus rocket will rise from the island to meet the Atlas far above the atmosphere. Neither the invading nor the defending rocket will carry genuine nuclear warheads (no one on Kwajalein wants a dose of peacetime fallout), but the Nike Zeus will be credited with a theoretical kill...