Word: weaponeering
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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These almost unknown men are responsible for making the weapon that holds in check all-out Communist aggression. They spend billions of public funds, tie up a good part of U.S. scientific and business brains, and operate an industrial empire that may be the pioneer of a new technological era. The AEC controls a land area half again as big as Delaware-and is growing more rapidly than any great U.S. business ever did. Its investment in plant and equipment ($2,174,000,000) makes it bigger than General Motors Corp. At the end of its present expansion program...
While newsmen and rifle experts looked on last week, the new weapons hurled rifle grenades 250 yds., sent tracers pinging off a tank at 400 yds. without a miss. In target contests, the new .30-cals. poured out fire twice as fast and just as accurately as the Army's standard 30-cal. M-1 Garand rifle. At 100 yds., their steel-core slugs plowed through half-inch armor plate; at 1,200 yds. they riddled a steel helmet; at 2,000 yds. they ripped through six inches of wooden planking. Fitted with 20-shot clips, the new automatic...
After the war, the U.S. and Great Britain went off in different directions in search of such a weapon. U.S. Ordnance men decided that the standard .30-cal. slug was the smallest size with enough stopping power. They got to work on a light-weight cartridge (the T-65) that was half an inch shorter than the standard Garand cartridge and weighed about 16% less, without sacrificing any weight in the bullet itself. The light rifle* that they built around the stubby new shell fires as heavy a slug with the same muzzle velocity (about 2,800 ft. per second...
British gun designers turned to a much smaller weapon: a .276-cal. automatic rifle with a light slug and a relatively low, 2,300-ft.-per-second muzzle velocity. U.S. experts who saw the British .276-cal. perform at Ft. Benning, Ga. (TIME, Aug. 20) call it a "pipsqueak" weapon. They do not like the .276-cal.'s high, telescope-like sight: it could snap off in battle, become useless in foggy or muddy terrain...
...foreign affairs, the minister pursued a very active policy-so active that in the chancelleries of nations thousands of miles away, lamps burned late into the night as other governments tried to find a way of satisfying his demands without ruining themselves. Not that he ever threatened war. His weapon was the threat of his own political suicide, as a wilful little boy might say, "If you don't give me what I want I'll hold my breath until I'm blue in the face. Then you'll be sorry...