Word: spartanly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dull black cylinder on a mock Spartan anti-ballistic missile waited buried an incredible 6,000 feet beneath tiny Amchitka Island in the Aleutians. The signal was given and in one-tenth of a millionth of a second, Cannikin, code name for the most powerful underground nuclear test ever held by the U.S., exploded with the force of 5 million tons of TNT. TIME Correspondent Karsten Prager reported from the command bunker on Amchitka that half a second after detonation the earth heaved upward, hiding the test site in a curtain of dust and water, and aftershocks rumbled...
...test was necessary, the AEC maintained, to assure that the Spartan system would provide a "thin shield" defense against nuclear attack from the Chinese. Some scientists argued, however, that ABM policy and technology has left the Spartan system behind, and the AEC is testing a warhead that would never be used as designed...
...because America is a capitalist country, but that Russia, the great socialist sister, should have the same values is incomprehensible to him and a betrayal of their common cause. If Kosygin succeeds in giving every Russian a small motorcycle, then that's the end of Mao's spartan Chinese Communism...
...with Nixon's decision made, AEC Commissioner Schlesinger was firm: "The primary purposes of Cannikin are to proof-test the Spartan warhead . . . before large investment of funds is made on that component of the Safeguard system. Environmental damage has been exhaustively considered, and overriding requirements of national security have, of necessity, taken precedence...
...case, the Spartan warhead will be buried forever and lost. Not to worry. It only cost $200 million. And if anybody is concerned about just leaving it there, with all its potential nuclear power, it can be harmlessly destroyed by a small charge of TNT, which the AEC has already installed against just such a contingency...