Word: tridents
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After Greenpeace protesters forced the cancellation of a test-firing of the Trident 2 missile last July by hanging an antinuclear banner on the communications mast of an American submarine, the Navy vowed that it would never again be similarly embarrassed. Last week, when the U.S.S. Tennessee launched a Trident 50 miles off Cape Canaveral, Fla., the protesters discovered how determined the Navy...
...popular on Capitol Hill. Conspicuously absent from the lists were such big-ticket items as the Navy's Seawolf attack submarine, the Air Force's Advanced Tactical Fighter and the Army's LHX attack helicopter. The Navy flouted the spirit of Malta further by scheduling a test of its Trident II submarine-based ballistic missile for Dec. 1 -- the day before the summit begins. The Navy's insensitivity to diplomatic timing so worried the Joint Chiefs of Staff that they are contemplating postponing the test...
Tipped with twelve nuclear warheads and carrying a price tag of $26.5 million each, the Trident II submarine-launched missile is supposed to give the U.S. the ability to destroy Soviet ICBMs still nestled in their silos. But hopes for the Trident's scheduled deployment in 1990 were set back last week when the weapon exploded during a test firing on the open sea. It was the second failure in three attempts; embarrassed Navy officials admitted that the probable reason for the misfires was a design flaw that should have been corrected on the drawing board...
Because the new Trident is about 10 ft. longer and almost twice as heavy as the model it replaces, the missile leaves a more turbulent, gaseous wake as it rises to the ocean surface. But engineers miscalculated the amount of water that would rush into the vacuum under the missile's rocket nozzles. Investigators say these "water jets" interfere with Trident's trajectory and have led to the two mishaps. Their conclusion: the missile must be redesigned. Correcting Trident II could cost up to $20 million and delay its introduction for nearly a year...
...used in Puget Sound in much the same way as they were in Viet Nam. One probable difference is that the dolphins will simply mark the location of the intruder or ensnare swimmers through some means less brutal than darts. Unless war breaks out, underwater saboteurs at the Trident base are more likely to be antinuclear protesters or animal-rights activists than enemy agents. That raises the bizarre possibility that dolphins might help the Navy arrest dolphin lovers...