Word: nike
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...evacuated, their hair falling out in patches, after an H-bomb test had sprinkled their home with radioactive residue. When the radioactivity on Rongelap died down, the refugees returned and Kwajalein quieted down. But last week it was busier than ever as a task force prepared to test the Nike Zeus, the U.S. Army's anti-missile missile. On the glaring, sun-baked coral of Kwajalein, scientists hope to find an answer to an ominous question: Can a reliable defense be built against surprise attack by intercontinental missiles...
...whether the approaching object is actually an enemy warhead, or a decoy, or a bit of space flotsam. If it is a warhead, the missile will be turned over to a third radar, which will track it until the time comes to shoot it down with a three-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...
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...
...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...
Skeptics abound who doubt that the Nike Zeus system will work well enough to justify its cost (nearly $900 million). They point out that a station can be saturated by coveys of attacking missiles arriving at the same instant. A simpler enemy stunt, the critics say, would be to make a single missile spew out electronic decoys that would look like warheads to the discrimination radar. Then most of the defending rockets that roared into space would waste their nuclear thunder...