Word: thermonuclear
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Atomic Energy Commission's Livermore, Calif, fusion laboratory, Teller turns his mind to development of tactical-size, low-fallout thermonuclear weapons. In addition, he serves on the AEC's General Advisory Committee and the Air Force's Scientific Advisory Board, carries on his own strenuous public education campaign in media as far afield from pure science as the This Week Sunday supplement. Main topics: the survival value of underground bomb shelters, the need for continued nuclear-weapons tests, and, above all, the urgency of keeping ahead of Russia in science...
...said it had recently scored four bull's-eyes on ground targets with its air-to-surface Rascal, a missile designed to extend the reach of the bomber force now in being. Rascal can be launched from an airplane 100 miles from target, can pack an atomic or thermonuclear warhead...
...Arthur E. Ruark, 57. His job is to ride herd on projects in progress at Princeton, Livermore (Calif.), Los Alamos and other scientific centers. Probably the most ambitious of these is centered at Princeton. Its chief is Professor Lyman Spitzer Jr., 43, an astronomer who got into thermonuclear physics because the interiors of the stars are convenient test tubes for observing what happens at very high temperatures. Stars need no magnetic bottle; their gases are held together by their own gravitation. Earth-side gravitation is too feeble for this, so Spitzer's main job is to devise a leakproof...
Thus the U.S.. armed with the local atomic capability of the Sixth Fleet and the worldwide thermonuclear capability of Strategic Air Command, and assured by week's end that a missile speedup was inevitable (see below), moved to meet Khrushchev's crude power play with a readiness to use power, if necessary. How to preserve that power and that diplomatic capability five to ten years hence, in the face of Sputnik's warning, was the heart of the sober second thought in Washington last week...
...seek," the Secretary said, "by experiments now carefully controlled, to find out how to eliminate the hazardous radioactive material now incident to the explosion of thermonuclear weapons. Also we seek to make nuclear weapons into discriminating weapons, suitable for defense against attacking troops, submarines and bombers, and for interception of intercontinental missiles. The Soviet Union seems not to want the character of nuclear weapons thus to be refined and changed. It seems to like it that nuclear weapons can be stigmatized as 'horror' weapons...