Word: launchful
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Much more is on the drawing boards. During the next 15 years, NASA hopes to ( spend $30 billion to $40 billion to launch satellites containing dozens of instruments for the Earth Observing System (EOS), the centerpiece of Mission to Planet Earth. They will study the impact of such forces as global warming, deforestation and desertification. NASA will also use satellites from other nations and ground monitors to develop a baseline of information against which global change can be measured...
...July the eight-year-old war, which has mainly been a guerrilla conflict, suddenly turned into an even more bloody set-piece struggle. Tamil fighters, known as Tigers, dropped their usual tactics of ambush and evasion to launch a 3,000-strong force against a government base controlling Elephant Pass, a narrow, one-mile causeway, surrounded by marsh, beaches and sand dunes, that connects the mainland with the Tigers' heartland, the Jaffna Peninsula...
...hard-liners' coup is history, but one ominous fact remains: the Soviet nuclear arsenal contains some 27,000 warheads scattered through several republics. Who will now control them? During the three days of Gorbachev's confinement, his so-called football -- the satchel containing launch- authorization codes -- was in the hands of the junta, raising concerns that its leaders might, in desperation, do something rash. And now, with at least the partial breakup of the U.S.S.R. a certainty, fears are growing that some of the seceding republics may insist that the weapons remain on their soil, in effect creating...
...International Institute for Strategic Studies: "There are several stages, an intricate system of codes and identifications, before nuclear weapons can be fired from the ground, from airplanes or from submarines." The system provides for two "footballs," while the U.S. has but one. To ready nuclear warheads for a launch, the codes from both footballs -- one in the hands of the head of state and the other from the Minister of Defense -- must be mated in the headquarters of the general staff. The combined codes would then be sent as an encrypted message down the chain of command to the operating...
Even if it had been physically possible for the junta to launch strategic weapons, it would have done them no good in putting down internal resistance: the missiles are aimed at foreign targets, and there would have been no time to reprogram them. Had the junta tried to use tactical or battlefield nukes, they would probably have faced the same internal military resistance that kept Soviet tanks from moving against Boris Yeltsin. As it turned out, President Bush later told reporters gathered at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Me., that U.S. intelligence detected no signals or movements indicating "a nuclear...