Word: thermonuclear
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ability to intercept and detonate an enemy's guided missiles before they can damage the U.S. proper. But beyond that was a vital area where serious exploration has made little if any inroad in public consciousness. Prime question: What can shelters do to protect people in all-out thermonuclear...
...missiles. Far more demanding than the anti-missile itself is development of the fully integrated and highly automatic system required-in the limited time available -to detect an ICBM on its way. track it, predict its trajectory and, at the proper instant, launch an intercept missile with nuclear or thermonuclear warhead. And what is the proper instant? When the missile is still in outer space? Or after it has slowed within the atmosphere? How will the system operate if a Hydra-headed missile rains down multiple charges or decoys? Or takes aerodynamic evasive action? Or orbits before plunging (see SCIENCE...
...force 30% more range. The Air Force has contracted for 30 test supersonic delta-wing B58 bombers for phasing in beside the medium B-473. Already SAC has its first operational intercontinental guided missile: Snark, a lumbering air-breather that cannot break the sound barrier but can dump a thermonuclear payload (as it proved in a flight test last week) on a target less than five miles in diameter at a range of 5,000 miles. A really hot Air Force prospect is Rascal, an air-to-ground missile for firing from B-47s that can hit a target...
...Clean" thermonuclear bombs, like clean small boys, do not necessarily stay clean for long. The most familiar kind of radioactive fallout comes from the fission of plutonium or uranium 235, and from the so-called clean bombs that the U.S. Government has announced contain only small amounts of these troublemaking substances. The bulk of the bomb's bang comes from fusion of hydrogen, which creates no fission products...
...bomb can be clean in one way and dirty in another. In Science, William H. Shipman and other scientists from the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, San Francisco, tell how they found large quantities of radioactive manganese 54 in the fallout from last year's thermonuclear tests at Eniwetok. Since Mn-54 is not a fission product, they concluded that it was formed when free neutrons from the explosion combined with iron or ordinary manganese, presumably in the bomb's structure. Figuring back, they estimated that "megacurie quantities" were produced...