Word: radar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Early Warning. When Soviet missiles were first discovered in Cuba, the U.S. hastily improvised an early-warning system. Three Air Force long-range radar units, designed to track satellites, were focused on Cuba to pick up any sign of a firing. The network would have provided about five minutes' warning for the mid-Atlantic coastal region and about 15 minutes for most of the Strategic...
...surrounded Russia with thickets of poised missiles. The picture is highly inaccurate. As the principal defender of the free world, the U.S. necessarily maintains many military installations overseas- 2,230 of them, according to a Pentagon count. But most of them are clearly unaggressive - supply depots, radar-warning stations, and so forth, with no strike capability at all. In only three foreign countries, Britain, Italy and Turkey, has the U.S. deployed strategic missiles pointed toward Russia. These intermediate-range missiles (IRBMs) are considered obsolescent, and the installations will probably be dismantled within the next few years. The IRBMs, with...
Rendezvous. Gemini's primary purpose is to practice rendezvous in earth orbit, a job of navigation and maneuver that will be controlled largely by ground-based computers. Only after the Gemini capsule and its target satellite have come within sight or radar range of each other will the pilot take charge. Even then a small computer will tell him how to make the two courses intersect. During the final approach, he will really "fly" the capsule. When sufficient experience has been accumulated, he will mate capsule with target, perhaps orbiting with it and taking advantage of its fuel stores...
...required to turn away to a non-Cuban port of its captain's own choosing. Similarly, Cuba-bound cargo aircraft would be intercepted and forced to land at a U.S. airport for inspection, or be shot down. As for Soviet submarines, they would be sought out by radar and sonar. U.S. forces would signal an unidentified sub by dropping some "harmless" depth charges while radioing the code letters IDKCA, the international signal meaning "rise to the surface." Any submarine that ignored the order would be depth-charged for keeps...
...Mariner II will pass plenty close enough to Venus to get a good look. Even at 40,000 miles, its radar and other scientific instruments will be effective if they work properly. Meanwhile, its en route instruments are measuring the solar wind, the great blast of electrically charged particles that the sun shoots out in all directions. At present the wind is rather gentle, but it can rise to hurricane force when a brilliant flare erupts on the sun's surface...