Word: radars
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...menacing gray cruisers wallowed in a wind-scoured sea, radar disks alive, sullen missile launchers lining their decks. They were the instruments of a half-century of a calculated war that never happened, a war constrained by the brutish power of just such ships...
...these breakthrough products look hopelessly oversize. Last month Compaq unveiled a 2.2-kg (6-lb.) full-powered portable computer that fits in a briefcase. Sharp and Poqet make even smaller models that slip into a suit pocket. Today there are fax machines, radar detectors, electronic dictionaries, cellular telephones, color televisions, even videotape recorders that fit comfortably in the palm of a hand...
...issue is of utmost importance to the U.S. armed forces. Virtually all American warplanes use radar, and many costly weapons systems, from the Navy's Aegis system to the Army's Patriot missile, are heavily reliant on the technology. By one estimate, about a quarter of U.S. military investment is radar related. If heavy use of radar becomes questionable, the Pentagon will have to rethink its whole strategy and allocation of resources...
...development of radar (short for radio detection and ranging) applications in the U.S. stemmed from the accidental discovery in 1922 that a ship moving between a radio transmitter and receiver interfered with the signals. The technology came into its own in World War II, when it progressed rapidly from a crude early-warning system barely able to locate ships and aircraft to a sophisticated electronic eye that can spot the periscope of a submerged submarine. Radar works because electronic signals bounce off objects, just as a voice is reflected by walls or buildings. Radar transmits radio waves and "listens...
...radar has a serious drawback: its signal is a blazing electronic beacon that can make the transmitter as much the hunted as the hunter. "Like a flashlight in a dark forest, radar can spotlight certain trees," says Theodore Postol, an electronics expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But everybody in the woods...