Word: weaponize
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...Army's videotape is spectacular. As unmanned planes sweep into view, the high-tech antiaircraft gun on the ground swivels and blows them out of the sky. It looks like a brilliant performance by one of the Pentagon's most controversial new weapons, the Sergeant York division air-defense gun, known as the DIVAD. In a test last year, the gun's laser-and-radar guidance system could not even hit a stationary helicopter, one of many embarrassments for the problem-plagued system. This time, claimed the contractor, Ford Aerospace, the weapon destroyed "six of seven high-performance aircraft...
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger must now decide whether to go ahead with plans to spend $4.2 billion for 618 of the weapons. According to one Pentagon source, a classified Army study bolsters the critics' case against the Sergeant York, concluding that the high-tech guidance system performs no better than the systems it was designed to replace. Weinberger said the latest test was "the most realistic operational testing that we ever put a weapon system through," but he is waiting to see further reports before he makes up his mind. "For the good of the taxpayer and the soldier...
...lunge for the jugular is most apparent in the ads. Since firearms cannot be sold through the mails, weapon manufacturers offer only catalogs to readers. But enough lethal ware, from blowguns to exploding arrows to mini-garrotes, can be bought to fend off any guerrillas who might happen to invade your backyard. Budding adventurers can bone up on techniques by ordering Get Even: The Complete Book of Dirty Tricks ("You'll never again have to 'grin and bear it' when inconsiderate creeps do you dirty"; $12.95) while sipping coffee from a Soldier of Fortune mug ($7.95) and relaxing...
...superbrainy young people, non-nerd division. They have been recruited to a double-dome school at the M.I.T.-Caltech level by slick Professor Jerome Hathaway (William Atherton), who has an explain-it-all science show on TV and a Government contract to build a particularly unsavory laser-powered weapon. His students do all the hard work, while he glides, snakelike, through the corridors of power. Among his drones are Mitch (Gabe Jarret), an innocent 15-year-old prodigy; Kent (Robert Prescott), who is teacher's pet, half toady, half Gestapo agent; and a case Hathaway has burned out (Jonathan Gries...
There were without doubt persuasive military reasons for using the new weapon in the summer of 1945. The first day of fighting on Iwo Jima had cost more American casualties than D-day; on Okinawa, 79,000 U.S. soldiers were killed or wounded. As the U.S. readied plans to invade the main islands, Japan was deploying up to 2 million soldiers and additional millions of "auxiliaries" who were clearly prepared to defend their homeland to the death. It was easy to believe estimates that an invasion would result in as many as a million American casualties, plus many more Japanese...