Word: warheaded
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...Provisions for destroying a malfunctioning missile and for keeping its warhead safe until near the target can be the same for both radio and inertial systems...
...project called for prodigies of technology. But the most formidable problem of all was one that should have been familiar to anyone who ever saw a meteor turn into a trail of fire in the night sky. It was the problem of "re-entry": how to get an ICBM warhead, with its protective nose cone, back through the earth's atmosphere without its being burned into sky-streaking embers. As history may one day note, it was at an Ithaca, N.Y. cocktail party that one of the most significant early steps toward success was taken...
...title of "Mr. Nose Cone," had to offer was experience and expertness in a testing device known as the shock tube. The problems of nose-cone re-entry were fearsome enough on paper. It was understood all too well that an ICBM re-entry body of cone and warhead would have to crash back into the earth's atmosphere at near-meteor speed of 15,000 m.p.h., with enough motion of energy to vaporize five times its weight of iron. Piling up ahead of the re-entry body would be a high-pressure air layer reaching...
Along such relatively simple lines. General Electric built most of the early nose cones and, considering the state of the art, they were successful enough in the first Thor and Atlas missiles. But they were heavy-and in an ICBM, every ounce of nose cone takes away from the warhead which is the rocket's real reason for being. And the blunt-nosed cones began slowing down while still high in the atmosphere, making them more vulnerable to antimissile missiles as they descended toward earth...
...warheads designed for the Polaris and Minuteman solid-fuel missiles, which the U.S. is depending upon to close the missile gap in the mid-1960s, pack a nuclear punch of about half a megaton, compared with an estimated eight megatons carried by Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, and about three or four megatons in the nose cone of the U.S.'s Atlas ICBM. With additional nuclear tests, the yield of the Polaris and Minuteman warheads could be significantly increased, although Admiral William Raborn Jr. has said he needs no further tests of the present Polaris warhead. Some U.S. scientists...