Word: nuke
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Today, nuclear warfare threatens the Indian subcontinent. Had Harry Truman imagined this circumstance? At the time he made the fateful but valiant decision to nuke Japan, President Truman was controlling what he hoped to be the denouement of a most horrendous global conflict. Though he was initiating the nuclear age, he could not possibly have forecast the dissemination of nuclear know-how to countries which at the time were still under the domain of the late British Empire. Even the Soviets were still in the dark as to the workings of America's newest weapon...
Washington is concerned by Vajpayee's public pro-nuke pronouncements but accepts at face value private assurances that his government will not heat up the arms race, at least not before it has completed a lengthy comprehensive review of defense strategy. Pakistan is worried, though, by the aggressively nationalistic tone in New Delhi. On April 6, Islamabad test-fires its first intermediate-range missile, the Ghauri, named for a 12th century Muslim conqueror who defeated the last Hindu King of Delhi, Prithviraj Chauhan. Prithvi also happens to be the name of one of India's ballistic missiles capable of toting...
...DELHI: In case you missed them, those five loud bangs earlier this week mean India has the bomb. And just to drive the point home, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said in an interview Friday that he has more than mere nuke tests up his sleeve. "We have a big bomb now," he said, "for which a necessary command and control system is also in place." Although Vajpayee didn't elaborate, that could mean India's missiles have been tipped with atomic warheads -- or the country's small submarine fleet has just gone nuclear...
...that reason, Earth's defenders, if they have the luxury of time, would prefer to send a robot craft to rendezvous with a threatening asteroid and determine its composition and mechanical strength before dispatching a nuke to the scene. Physicist Edward Teller suggests that this is what we should do, just for practice, when XF11 passes far from Earth two years from now. Other defensive plans being bandied about at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national labs involve more exotic devices, such as neutron bombs or netlike arrays of interconnected tungsten balls...
...there's no cause for alarm -- at least, not until 2002, when the rock will be close enough for radar to detect its exact course. That leaves three decades for scientists to decide whether or not to nuke the thing -- and for Hollywood to produce a plethora of asteroid Armageddon flicks...