Word: thermonuclear
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...second generation of solid-fuel missiles, designed for mass production and mass deployment through the mid-1960s, must have smaller, higher-yield thermonuclear warheads to fit their smaller nose cones. The Navy's Polaris engineers managed to test their bird's initial warhead just before the moratorium, but could not test its higher-yield follow-up warhead; the Air Force's Minuteman (see SCIENCE) and the Army's Pershing are being developed at a cost of millions to fit warheads that have not been tested, and, under the moratorium, may not be. All these tests could...
...recalculating the results of its underground shot in October 1958, has discovered that underground explosions below 20 kilotons (about Hiroshima size) cannot accurately be detected by known seismographic instruments (TIME, Jan. 12). Meanwhile, the U.S. has had to hold up development of "clean" (low-fallout) bombs and smaller thermonuclear weapons. Sample result: a delay in the smaller warhead for the second-generation Minuteman intercontinental missile...
...into now-obsolescent air-breathing missiles-Snark, Navaho, Regulus, etc.-that were inherently useless for space work. Meanwhile, the Russians were pushing ahead with ballistic missiles. By 1953, when a team of U.S. physicists headed by the late Hungarian-born John von Neumann devised a way of making a thermonuclear warhead small enough to be delivered by a ballistic missile of economic size, the Russians had a long head start in ballistic-missile development...
...sounds like a lightning bolt is going off in the next room," says one worker. The building shakes, but researchers at Washington's Naval Research Laboratory hardly look up. They know it's only dynamic Alan Kolb, 30, at work on his thermonuclear experiment...
Soon Project Tepee was soaking up all the back-scatters it could handle. With experience. Thaler found he could distinguish and identify the special characteristics of everything from summer lightning to Polaris missiles, thermonuclear detonations and the aurora borealis. Last summer, in the line of his 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...