Word: warhead
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...miles from California. Wilkinson, director of U.S. Army effort known as "Homing Overlay Experiment," had good reason to hope for some insomnia in Moscow: his project scored its first success last week. A special interceptor rocket fired from Meek Island in the Kwajalein archipelago had struck the dummy warhead of a Minuteman I intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that had been launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California some 30 earlier. Military analyst described the collision, which pulverized both projectiles more than 100 miles above the earth's surface, as a major technological advance that would support President Reagan...
...novel gadgetry that made Homing Overlay successful is a sophisticated guidance system in the interceptor's warhead. It is able, thanks to a remarkable infrared sensor, to fix in space a target as small as a human being 1,000 miles away...
...missiles raced toward each other at a combined speed of 18,000 m.p.h., the interceptor's warhead expanded into an umbrella-shaped array of aluminum "ribs," 15 feet in diameter. As it turned out, the sensor aboard the killer rocket was so accurate that the ribs were unnecessary: the missiles themselves collided. The feat has been compared to one bullet hitting another, but, said Wilkinson, the two missiles were moving "about twice as fast as bullets...
There are now approximately 50,000 nuclear weapons. They have brought the world to a state of critical mass: the detonation of one bomb or warhead could touch off a chain reaction leading to the extinction of the human race. For a fact of life-the existence of those weapons-to be so bound up with the possibility of the death of the planet is an affront to reason and conscience alike...
Transcending all foreign policy concerns is the sorry state of U.S. -Soviet relations. The Olympic boycott expands. Sakharov suffers. The Soviets seem unwilling to talk about nuclear-arms reductions. Instead, the Soviet Defense Minister announced last week that Moscow has added two warhead-laden submarines to the several already patrolling American coasts. Reagan tried to shrug off the new subs. "If I thought there was some reason to be concerned about them," he joshed, "I wouldn't be sleeping in this house tonight...