Word: teak
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...regular duty, Thaler directed the Navy's Argus Project, in which atom bombs were exploded 300 miles above the South Atlantic (TIME, March 30). In Washington, some 7,000 miles away, a Project Tepee set picked up the shots. The same set had also successfully registered the Teak and Kettle high-altitude thermonuclear explosions over Johnston Island in the Pacific. As Tepee grew, its operators learned to track missiles with such discrimination that they could distinguish the successes from the failures...
...Teak was the name of the first of two high-altitude H-bombs set off by the U.S. over the Pacific near Johnston Island last summer. Lifted 40 miles above the earth by a Redstone missile, the bomb was detonated a few minutes before midnight. Out of the blackness came a fireball that grew to eleven miles in width in less than half a second and could be seen in Hawaii, 700 miles to the northeast. Its multicolored aurora was observed 3,000 miles away in Samoa. Some nights later a similar device, called Orange, was fired from 20 miles...
Finally releasing details last week, the Department of Defense and the AEC called Teak and Orange "by far the most spectacular shots ever fired by the U.S." They were also the first megaton (i.e., equivalent to 1,000,000 tons of TNT) bombs ever exploded by the U.S. in the stratosphere...
...high-altitude explosions to cause "eclipse blindness"-lesions of the retina, so called because they have most often happened to people who watch eclipses of the sun without protecting their eyes. Rabbits were chosen as the test animals. AEC scientists found that an explosion the size and height of Teak delivers its thermal energy in less time than a rabbit (or a man) can blink. Said the report grimly: "Retinal burns were produced in the rabbits at distances up to 300 nautical miles." This tended to support earlier Army research indicating that an atomic fireball bursting over a battlefield...
...result of keeping its black majority firmly in a minority place, there has been no serious racial trouble for 50 years. But in the present grim atmosphere of expected violence, M.P.s in Salisbury began acting as if panga-bearing rebels were already chopping away at the great teak doors of the Assembly itself...