Word: trigger
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...incompetent division adjutant. Over the ghastly scene the snowy Carpathians loom like symbols of nature's indifference. But Heinrich neither needs nor uses literary symbolism. With a spare, brutal directness of language, he is able to show how men fight and die, convey the pressing of a trigger, the spreading stain of blood in the snow. Crack of Doom makes one thing overpoweringly clear: Infantryman Heinrich was there, and he didn't miss a thing...
...missiles in northern New Jersey three years ago, the Army carefully explained that the 21-ft. TNT and shrapnel projectiles were virtually accident-proof. A missile battery, said the Army, was no more dangerous a neighbor than a gas station. Last week the gas-station blew up. Installing a trigger modification on one of the 526th B Battery Nikes near Leonardo, N.J., ordnance technicians accidentally detonated the missile. Explosion and flame touched off seven more Nikes squatting on adjacent pads, blew or burned ten men to death, showered a three-mile radius with fragments...
...already converted three Nikes that day: so routine was their operation that the no-danger yellow light glowed on the battery control panel. The team started its fourth and final conversion shortly after 1 p.m.-began a familiar process in which it removed a warhead, took off the old trigger and its brackets, replaced them with a new trigger and brackets. Somewhere in that process on the fourth missile there was a mishap. Suddenly the missile blew with a roar and a sky-searing pillow of orange flame from burning kerosene and nitric acid fuels. After the eight missiles...
...really dependable safety device, say Huston and Miller, should tell on its own when the reactor is starting an excursion. The best way to trigger its action is to combine a pad of material containing uranium with a layer of high-melting solder. When the neutrons in the reactor rise above a critical level, showing that an excursion has started, the uranium fissions at a rate that creates enough heat to melt the solder. Then high-pressure gas will shoot neutron-absorbing poison into the reactor. Even if other controls have failed, this last-ditch nuclear fire extinguisher will keep...
...TRIGGER MORTIS, by Frank Kane (251 pp.; Rinehart; $2.95), starts shooting up the seamier side of Manhattan long before anyone thinks of calling the cops. Johnny Liddell, one of the hardest private eyes in town, takes on ex-pugs, Harlem hopheads, dance-hall dolls, a poverty-row pressagent and the alcoholic editorial staff of a scandal magazine in a two-fisted attempt to keep a client from being reminded of her days as a dancer at stag smokers. It proves only that when a girl gets into trouble there is always a good man around to get her out, provided...