Word: targets
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...British Olympians scoffed, as it turned out, at the sheer modesty of the 35-medal target set out by UK Sport, the body that distributes government cash to athletes. And they laughed in the face of UK Sport's hope for an eight-placed finish in the 2008 medal table. In short, their ambitions proved most un-British-like. "The performance of 'Team GB' in the Olympics is moving beyond the sublime and towards the ridiculous," said an editorial in Britain's Daily Telegraph. "We are British, for heaven's sake - how are we supposed to cope with such...
...press, which has run headlines like, "The Unspeakable Depravity of 'Uncle Gary.'" Child advocates hope that hype will help reform a legal system which too often lets pedophiles slip through its cracks. "He's shone a spotlight on U.K. sex offenders who go overseas and off the radar, and target children where they are highly vulnerable," says Zoe Hilton, policy advisor at London-based National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. She's calling for governments to work more closely with one another to investigate and track sex offenders. But for Gadd, changes to the law are unlikely...
...plan backed by the panel calls for putting up to four non-explosive "dispersible kinetic energy projectiles" atop each missile. Each GPS-guided projectile would contain about 1,000 tungsten rods that would strike the target at a mile a second (a fuse could spew them more widely across the ground, with less impact, or let all 250 pounds hit the same point for maximum destruction). The force of a single rod, the report says, would be similar to that of a hefty 50-caliber bullet. The lack of any explosive would generate precise mayhem, "comparable to the type...
Sounds nifty, until you read the fine print. It notes that Pentagon studies "indicate that in most cases, a single CTM [Conventional Trident Modification] KEP [Kinetic Energy Projectile] will have a high kill probability against fixed soft targets if target geolocation accuracy and guidance, navigation, and control accuracy are as predicted." That's eight caveats right there. Such a weapon would be worthless against moving or heavily-defended targets (developing such a capability would take at least a decade and cost as much as $25 billion) and represents only a "niche capability" designed to attack stationary terrorists or nuclear weapons...
Which raises the most important question of all: a hammer is worthless if you can't find the nail. "There remains the challenge of finding a target in the first place," the report concurs, before explaining that future constellations of space-based spy satellites will make the task easier. Yet despite repeated tries, the U.S. has failed to locate Osama bin Laden, and missed killing Saddam Hussein at the beginning of the last Iraq war when attacking sites where he reportedly was present. The NRC panel implies that both men were in the cross hairs but moved before cruise missiles...