Word: vela
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These are not idle fears, but U.S. nuclear authorities have not been idle about them either. For five years the Atomic Energy Commission has anxiously been pushing a project code-named Vela-Hotel, designed to detect nuclear explosions in space. Last week the Hotelmen delivered their first package of special instruments. Before the end of 1963, similar instrument packages are scheduled to take the long rocket-ride into space on Air Force-launched satellites...
...islands from Eniwetok to Christmas, and in the Atomic Energy Commission's Nevada-based Vela tests to detect far-off nuclear blasts, E.G. & G. has honed its ability to estimate worldwide explosions (by clocking the momentary fluorescence given off). Along the way the company has mushroomed from a fledgling enterprise employing a dozen people to a flourishing corporation with 2,000 employees (70% of them carrying top-level Government Q clearance), laboratories in Boston, Las Vegas and Santa Barbara, and a panoply of scientific equipment and knowledge that this year will gross $40 million...
...distance at which graphic differences become apparent, Leet feels, has been overlooked by scientists who are engaged in detection research for the U.S. government. Because these scientists, who worked on the Berkner Panel and the Air Force's Project Vela Uniform, reasoned that moving their stations closer to the suspicious seismic events would enhance chances of detection, Leet feels "they have missed the forest for the trees...
...derisively but not respectfully, "doodlebuggers,." This is a popular term for seismic prospect seismologists, electronic engineers who use a fraction of the know-how of earthquake seismology. Leet himself is an earthquake station seismologist. His application to work for AFTAC, a unit that presently constitutes the Air Force Vela Uniform test detection project, was turned down on the grounds that Harvard had no instrumentation manufacturing facilities. Leet dismisses this as a "thin lie," since he had submitted estimates of the instruments he needed, all of which are available at a firm located in Boston...
Leet has no political axe to grind. "I was naive enough to believe that science was objective in anyone's hands, but that Vela data was as full of holes as Swiss cheese. Three months ago I wasn't aware that it would be carried over and used at Geneva. How the hell can a thing like this go on? When I found out I was mad enough to do some digging." The Professor, who was born in Alliance, Ohio, sixty-one years ago, has a ready laugh still untainted by cynicism. He knows it seems quixotic for a lone...