Word: thermonuclear
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Underlining nuclear power's international promise, AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss stressed that U.S. and British scientists have been working in ''close cooperation" on controlled thermonuclear reactions, and will continue to do so. Added President Eisenhower next day, in a statement aimed toward Russia: "All Americans sincerely hope that other scientists in other countries will be encouraged by their governments to do similar research. As these and other experiments continue, the adoption of a worldwide atoms-for-peace program becomes more inevitable to permit all scientists to devote their skills and energies to the betterment of mankind...
Three Doughnuts. Britain's ZETA (Zero-Energy Thermonuclear Assembly), which was shown last week by Sir John Cockcroft at Harwell atomic laboratory, looks like three 10-ft. doughnuts laced together like links of a chain. The central horizontal torus (scientific word for a doughnut shape) is a ring-shaped aluminum vacuum chamber with a 39-in. bore. The two vertical doughnuts linked into it are the iron cores of a transformer. When a small amount of deuterium gas is fed into the evacuated torus and a heavy electric current is shot through the transformer, an even heavier current (this...
This "pinch effect" is the most promising approach to thermonuclear power, but unfortunately the pinched current wriggles so violently that it tends to slam in millionths of a second against the walls of its container. The trick, a difficult one, is to make it stand still as long as possible and not touch the walls...
...most impressive U.S. thermonuclear work was done at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory with a machine called Perhapsatron S-3. Its doughnut is made of glass surrounded by copper, and is about as big as a scooter tire, with its minor diameter (through the dough) about 2 in. compared to ZETA's 39 in. The temperature of its pinch is higher than ZETA's (about 6,000,000° C.), but the pinch lasts only a few millionths of a second, about one-thousandth as long as ZETA's. Other thermonuclear machines at Los Alamos use short, straight...
Until the ICBMs are ready, the Air Force must depend upon its manned thermonuclear bombers reinforced by its only near-operational intercontinental guided missile, the Northrop Snark, an air-breathing, star-guided, 600-m.p.h. missile that can take a hydrogen warhead 5,000 miles to target or deploy electronic countermeasures over an enemy heartland to lure defenders away from main bomber strikes elsewhere...