Word: uranium
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...least a decade, the nuclear-weapon and missile-development programs have been top-priority items for Peking, and are generously supplied with scarce capital equipment and even scarcer trained manpower. China is rich in the raw materials of the nuclear age, even used to export uranium ore to Russia before the ideological split in 1960. Its gaseous-diffusion plant at Lanchow is estimated to turn out enough U-235 to build some 20 bombs a year, and Peking now has as many as 80 bombs of various kinds in various stages of development. That rate will likely soar sharply...
...journeyed south to Provence to see for himself how his offspring is growing. He watched a mock alert by Mirage bombers that can carry A-bombs, donned a white coat to tour a nuclear testing center at Cadarache and toasted workers with champagne at the huge Pierrelatte plant where uranium is enriched for use in a planned French H-bomb. The force will never approach in destructive capability the weaponry of the big powers-some of its critics still refer to it as the force de farce -but De Gaulle has none the less given the French a nuclear sting...
...most dramatic portion of the flechette's travels is yet to come. As it emerges from its target in a shower of hot gases and molten steel, the hot uranium again comes in contact with air. Without its ablative coating to protect it, it oxidizes explosively, producing overpressures that on a large scale could damage a tank or bunker...
When it enters the target, the flechette is stripped of an ablative coating that has protected the uranium from the 1000° F. temperature generated by air friction (solid uranium will ignite at 338° F.) As the bare depleted uranium comes in contact with steel, an exothermic, or heat-producing, effect occurs when the metals react chemically. This instantaneous heating, combined with the searing heat of impact, raises the temperature of the surrounding steel to such a degree that the flechette literally melts its way through, leaving a hole many times its own diameter...
...hopes soon to adapt the uranium flechettes for firing from a multi-barreled, rotary Gatling gun that can spew out hundreds of rounds per second. When this weapon system has been perfected, there seems little that will be able to stand in the way of its deadly rain of uranium bullets...