Word: lapp
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Undaunted by Danger. Before the launch, Nuclear Physicist Ralph Lapp gave voice to the nagging fears that many Americans have about this week's mission. "We are pushing our luck," he said, "gambling that everything will work perfectly. NASA experts will assure you that they have thought through the risks and have planned for them. Well, they didn't in Apollo...
Henry is down there." One who viewed Nixon's choice with outright misgiving, however, was Nuclear Physicist Ralph Lapp, who has often been at odds with the nation's scientific Establishment for its overinvolvement with the military. He argued that Kissinger is an unreconstructed hardliner...
Hard or Soft? Lapp is not the only American with that view of Kissinger. Herman Kahn, head of the Hudson Institute "think tank" and long an influential consultant to the Pentagon, once noted that the creator of the film character Dr. Strangelove used "part Henry Kissinger, part myself, with a touch of Wernher von Braun" for a model. In fact, claims Yarmolinsky, "the resemblance is entirely superficial. He is no war lover, period." Rather, Kissinger is acknowledged by most of his colleagues as a thoroughgoing "realist" among the often dogmatic band of thinkers known as "defense intellectuals...
...Sprint caused an incoming ICBM to explode at an altitude of 50 miles or less, the results would be more devastating. Quoting from an AEC publication, Lapp reported that in a test of a megaton-range weapon exploded 50 miles over the Pacific in 1958, exposed rabbits had suffered retinal burns at slant distances up to 345 miles from the blast. Furthermore, the AEC document read, "it is felt that there would be some danger to human beings at distances greater than 200 miles under similar circumstances...
Lower-altitude explosions in the atmosphere would be even more disastrous, Lapp calculates. The detonation of a ten-megaton ICBM by an intercepting Sprint at an altitude of 50,000 feet would produce second-degree skin burns in people over an area as large as 2,000 sq. mi. and cause dry paper to ignite over an area...