Word: targets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Neither the U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. has an operational intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), nor will either have one for two to three years. To date, the Russians are known to have test-fired as many as five ICBMs, have scored at least one hit on a target at a 3,400-mile range; the U.S. has test-fired four models of the Air Force's Convair ICBM Atlas, has scored two hits at a programed initial 500-to 600-mile range. Atlas, U.S. missilery's prime weapon (cost: about $4,000,000 apiece) is fueled with a mixture...
Until the ICBMs are ready, the Air Force must depend upon its manned thermonuclear bombers reinforced by its only near-operational intercontinental guided missile, the Northrop Snark, an air-breathing, star-guided, 600-m.p.h. missile that can take a hydrogen warhead 5,000 miles to target or deploy electronic countermeasures over an enemy heartland to lure defenders away from main bomber strikes elsewhere...
...attack-proof radio warning net, begin building radioactive fallout shelters coast to coast (but a fantastically expensive blast-shelter program deserves more study), disperse stockpiles of food to meet famine and industrial reserves to meet economic chaos (with immediate tax incentives for companies that build new plants away from target areas). Beyond this obviously costly program the U.S. should plan to help U.S. allies plan and pay for their civil defense programs too. "Civil defense will not be easy and it can never be complete...but protection against radioactive fallout and other contamination appears to be much more feasible...
...blue? Why do fried potatoes turn brown? What is the molecular secret of life itself? The answers could not shoot and therefore should not be bought with defense dollars. Why would anyone want to go to the moon? An outer-space satellite could not destroy a target and should therefore have a relatively low priority. In 1957, for example, Wilson's research and development cuts took the Army down from $596 million to $327 million, the Navy from $666 million to $505 million ("That's a lotta money to spend on research, young fella," said Wilson...
...Nikita Khrushchev, in an interview with a Brazilian Communist newspaperman, had plugged for a booming trade that would exchange Brazil's coffee, cocoa, hides, sugar and cotton for such manufactured goods as "oil-well-drilling equipment and automobiles." The trade offers, suspiciously similar, were aimed at a big target: a country with 100,000 Communist Party members and enough party-liners to swing a tight election. They were shrewdly directed at sensitive areas such as Petrobras, of which the public is fiercely proud. Publicly, Petrobras was cool to the Torgbraz offers, but privately it awaited a top governmental decision...