Word: targets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Imagine a nuclear-tipped missile rising from a silo deep inside the Soviet Union, fixed on a target in the U.S. Almost immediately its fiery exhaust plumes trip warning sensors in satellites orbiting overhead. One of those satellites sends a powerful beam of light, or perhaps even a cascade of subatomic particles, bursting down from the heavens like a Jovian lightning bolt. The beam homes in on the ascending missile and fastens onto its nose cone. Burning through, the beam turns the electronic guidance system into silicon mush, sending the missile wobbling off course and totally immobilizing its nuclear warhead...
...many times faster than even the highest-velocity conventional rockets. In the case of lasers, which send off beams of highly concentrated light of a single frequency (or color), the speed is that of Light itself, about 186,000 miles per second. That means the beam arrives at its target literally in a flash. If a missile were traveling at, say, six times the speed of sound (4,400 m.p.h. at sea level), it would have moved only nine feet before a laser beam arrived from 1,000 miles away. High-velocity beams of charged particles would be harder...
...memo written last year by Assistant Secretary of the Navy George Sawyer that TIME has obtained. Sawyer urged the Navy to put forth its "most optimistic estimate" when drawing up its shipbuilding budget for fiscal 1984. Among other things, he proposed that the Navy "assume no [cost] growth beyond target" and eliminate all calculations of how much changes in ship specifications might increase the cost of building vessels. Which of his recommendations, if any, the Navy might have accepted in preparing its request for $12.7 billion in shipbuilding funds for fiscal 1984 is unknown, but there are some clues that...
Even if demand bounces up to OPEC's target level of 17.5 million bbl. per day, the group still faces the danger of widespread cheating on quotas. Similar production agreements in the past have crumbled as several countries, including Iran, Nigeria and Venezuela, offered under-the-table price discounts to raise sales. These nations are buffeted by economic and financial difficulties that will make more cheating almost irresistible...
Such conservative distress is not new. A longtime target of complaint is the World Council of Churches, to which many major U.S. denominations also belong but which is separate from the N.C.C. For 13 years the W.C.C.'s Program to Combat Racism has given regular grants to African guerrillas righting to overthrow repressive white regimes. The W.C.C. says it does not "pass judgment on those victims of racism who are driven to violence as the only way left to them to redress grievances." The money is intended for welfare, not arms, but churches do not monitor...