Word: gunbarrel
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...public documents, some of them published by the AEC. Essentially, all that is needed to achieve a blast is to bring together a sufficient amount of properly shaped fissionable material fast enough to initiate a massive chain reaction. To do that, the Hiroshima bomb used the so-called gunbarrel technique: both ends of a heavy metal pipe were stuffed with U-235 and the charge at one end was used as a projectile. To detonate the bomb, the U-235 projectile was hurled by conventional explosives down the barrel and into the mass at the other end. The density...
...have tried to encourage migration back to the country. For example, McDonnell Douglas Corp. has five plants in Tennessee. Initially, job seekers were local residents, but within a month applications were pouring in from former Tennesseans fed up with city life. The Daisy Manufacturing Co. moved lock, stock and gunbarrel from Michigan to Rogers...
...Yeah--back to the womb," comes the answer from up the crawlway. But it's not that at all: it's damp and cold down here, with a million tons of rock balanced over your head. In the long squeeze coming through the Gunbarrel, even an experienced caver sometimes feels a twitch of claustrophobia. Novices may have to be dragged up with a rope...
Under the fissure, the passage becomes horizontal, and you crawl 100 feet on your belly, pushing a pack of equipment ahead of you. Further beyond, the passage leads to a shorter Gunbarrel that ends in a "sump": a low tube nearly filled with water, with only three of four inches of breathing space at the top, in dry weather. Then the cave becomes high enough to walk in and leads to miles of unmapped passages. But this is only New York. In West Virginia, or Kentucky, or Mexico, the dimensions are much more fantastic...
...feel good to have made it through what the map calls an "impassable passage" or one that isn't on the map at all. Even as a beginner, you feel you've accomplished something when the Grotto inducts you into its "Order of the Gunbarrel" for having "successfully negotiated that curious passage." And when you get outside of a cave and feel the solid ground underneath you, you really know how solid...