Word: ship
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...shelter with the heavy-walled oxygen and water tanks that must be brought along anyway. Soviet scientists are experimenting with generating strong electrically charged fields around the spacecraft. These would have an effect similar to that of the earth's magnetic field, deflecting the speeding particles around the ship...
...Iranian side, both civilian and military jets take off from Bandar Abbas airport. Military traffic controllers keep close watch on ship movements in the gulf; they must have known that the Vincennes was engaged in a gun battle with Iranian speedboats (two were eventually sunk) only twelve miles offshore at the southern end of the gulf at the very moment that Flight 655 took off. Yet apparently nobody warned the civilian traffic controllers that Flight 655's path would take it directly over a developing firefight; had the controllers known that, they say, they would have delayed the takeoff...
...version of the craft would be capable of doing much damage to the Vincennes. The planes, built in the U.S. and sold to Iran in the 1970s during the reign of the Shah, are designed to fight other aircraft and are ordinarily equipped only with air-to-air, not ship-killing, missiles. The Pentagon retorts that Iran is known to have Harpoon antiship missiles and could have fired them; other experts doubt it. In any case, say some pilots, an F-14 trying to sink the Vincennes would probably have been flying much faster and much lower than the plane...
...trouble is that Rogers and his crew had no time to reflect on such considerations. A ship nowadays can easily be sunk by a missile delivered from a plane that no one on board ever sees. In the open ocean, a possibly hostile plane can be tracked over hundreds of miles. But Admiral William Crowe Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has likened combat in the Persian Gulf -- only about 25 miles wide at the narrowest point of the Strait of Hormuz -- to "fighting in a lake." A plane can reach a ship's missile range in minutes...
Since then, the U.S. has promulgated new, hair-trigger "rules of engagement" for the gulf. They specify that commanders need not wait until their forces are fired upon before unloosing their own weapons. All they need is some convincing indication that a ship or plane is approaching with hostile intent. Doubtless influencing Rogers' decision was the fact that his ship had just been engaged in hostilities. Following reports of Iranian speedboat attacks on two neutral ships, the Vincennes sent a helicopter to investigate. The Iranians fired on the helicopter, triggering a firefight that Flight 655 had the foul luck...