Word: nuclear
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After years of sophisticated underground nuclear tests in Nevada, U.S. weapons scientists are confident that they have finally conceived an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system that can be effective. Sidestepping the complex problem of directly intercepting an attacking 17,000-m.p.h. intercontinental ballistic missile with a defensive missile -a feat equivalent to hitting a flying bullet with another bullet-they have designed a system that will use great bursts of X rays from exploding nuclear warheads to destroy enemy missiles at a distance...
...increase the intensity of X rays produced by a nuclear explosion, physicists can reduce the amount of uranium 238 in the outer layer of ABM warheads and add more tritium, which raises the temperature of the blast, to the fissionable material. As a result, nearly 80% of the energy released by the explosion of the new warheads, believed to be in the one-megaton range, is in the form of high-energy X rays. To extend the lethal range of these rays, which are quickly absorbed or attenuated when traveling through air, the ABM warhead will be carried high above...
Plasma Sheath. During the brief instant of the nuclear explosion (which lasts only five ten-millionths of a second), X rays traveling at the speed of light emanate from the center of the blast. Although their effect diminishes sharply at increasing distances even in the vacuum of space,* the X rays from a one-megaton blast are intense enough to destroy an ICBM caught within a sphere extending two miles from the exploding ABM warhead...
...back to its 1961 sales peak of $2 billion, the company last year earned $58 million on sales that were up by 22% to $1.8 billion. Nearly 80% of that comes from Government orders for items ranging from Atlas and Centaur rockets for NASA to Navy surface ships and nuclear-powered attack submarines...
...they probe deeper into the heart of the atom, discovering ever smaller and more mysterious particles and particles within particles, scientists have succeeded in bringing the once stable world of nuclear physics to a state of near chaos. Groping among their new-found lambdas, pions, kaons, sigmas and other bits of matter with strange names and even stranger characteristics, physicists hope some day to restore order by finding a truly elemental particle - one out of which all the others are made...