Word: rocketings
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...rebels' timing was impeccable. Najibullah, leader of the Moscow-backed regime in Afghanistan, was 15 minutes into his opening address at a National Assembly session called to adopt a new constitution giving him vast powers as President. Suddenly a rocket explosion shook the meeting hall. Three more blasts, each louder than the last, followed during the next few minutes. The beefy Najibullah, 41, known to his countrymen as "the Ox," never flinched as he outlined a policy of national reconciliation aimed at ending eight years of civil war. The rockets killed five people outside the hall, helping the rebels make...
...Egyptian- and Chinese-made Kalashnikov assault rifles, trudged up the forested ridges along the Pakistan-Afghan border. On Nov. 13 some 10,000 rebels attacked Soviet and Afghan government troops along a 60-mile front. In the first hour of the fighting, a mujahedin Chinese-made BM-12 rocket launcher at Nawa Pass, southeast of Asadabad, completely annihilated an Afghan army post in the valley below. In the past an operation of such scope and intensity would have been rendered impossible by attacking Soviet aircraft. "We are not afraid of the Russian jets anymore," a Stinger operator boasted to TIME...
...most striking new feature of the long-planned Galileo mission, first scheduled for 1982, is a looping itinerary that will provide momentum for the spacecraft by utilizing the gravitational fields of Venus and the earth. This "slingshot" routing became necessary when NASA officials decided that the rocket originally scheduled to boost the craft from a shuttle cargo bay could pose a hazard; it was replaced with a safer solid-fuel booster. Another change in plans involved putting extra gold sheeting on the Galileo spacecraft because of the scheduled pass close to the superhot atmosphere of Venus...
...class of missiles that Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union had arrayed against Western Europe. Each was mounted on a mobile launcher and armed with three highly accurate warheads that could be fired nearly 3,100 miles. In a minor coup, Western intelligence discovered that the Kremlin's strategic rocket forces secretly referred to this formidable weapon by the innocent-sounding name Pioneer, the Soviet equivalent of Boy Scout or Girl Scout. NATO designated it the SS-20 and warned that it constituted a major escalation in the arms race...
...game being played to a draw this week began about ten years ago, when Ronald Reagan was a radio commentator and Gorbachev was Communist Party boss for the Stavropol region. That was when the strategic rocket forces started deploying the SS-20s. But that same year, Soviet civilian leaders began to have doubts about whether more and more nuclear weapons like the SS-20 necessarily meant more security and power for the U.S.S.R. The Kremlin initiated a gradual shift in emphasis away from nuclear weaponry to conventional weaponry as instruments of Soviet influence and intimidation, particularly in Europe. In January...