Word: thermonuclear
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...wing, partly to the concentrated power of its four great General Electric J79 engines (more than 15,000 lbs. thrust each). Another important factor is the "pod" that can be hung below its fuselage. Almost ideally streamlined, the pod has comparatively little drag, but it can carry a large thermonuclear bomb and fuel for the outgoing leg of a long flight. At the target, the pod can be dropped. In effect, the use of the pod eliminates empty bomb bays and fuel tanks that other bombers must bring home with them at high cost in air resistance...
...offers a solution to a critical problem: how to keep the bomber from being destroyed by the effects of its own thermonuclear bomb. The toss-bombing technique (TIME, Sept. 24), which projects the bomb forward and upward while the bomber turns on its back and gets away, does not give a big margin of safety in the case of high-yield bombs. But if the pod is engineered as an air-to-ground missile with rocket propulsion of its own, it can be launched while the Hustler is many miles away from the target. While it is still curving through...