Word: target
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Testing weapons systems instead of isolated "nuclear devices" is one of the announced purposes of the U.S. tests at Bikini. One of the systems that needs testing most is the atom-armed antimissile rocket that both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. are believed to be developing. To protect a target city from a long-range missile, this weapon must attack its quarry high above the atmosphere...
Andrew Sakacs, 43, had a pleasant Saturday outing a fortnight ago with his son and little grandson. He tramped through woods in sparsely settled Lockwood Valley in California's Ventura County, got in some target practice. Back in El Rio and getting undressed, he noticed a red spot, like a fleabite, on the inner side of his right ankle, but thought nothing of it. Feeling fit on Monday, Sakacs, a retired Navy chief petty officer, put in a full day's work as a mechanic on a water research project at the Port Hueneme naval base. That night...
...Texas goats. Outraged by a report that the goats are being plugged with high-powered rifles at Fort Sam Houston in order to give Army medics practice in treating battlefield casualties, Conservationist Neuberger demanded that Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson investigate the tale and end any such inhumane target practice. At week's end, Wilson had made no reply to Neuberger, nor had the Pentagon made any move to deny that the goats are under fire, not only in Texas, but also at the Army Chemical Center in Maryland...
...miss, Quarles added, was the result of "human error." For months before the drop the B-52's crew, drawn from the elite special-weapons test group at Kirtland Air Force Base, had made practice runs over the target. But when the time came for the actual firing pass, the crew, probably jittery over the effect the multimegaton burst might have on the bomber itself, failed to correct a navigation error that threw the plane off course...
...bomb exploded far enough away from the target to render useless some of the elaborate instrumentation set up at the test site. But the Air Force sturdily maintained that the drop had successfully proved something far more important: the B-52 can deliver the H-bomb and get away intact...