Word: warheaded
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...neutron warhead was designed to stop Soviet tanks, but so far the only damage caused by the weapon has been within NATO. Relations between the two most important of NATO's 15 members, the U.S. and West Germany, have plunged to their lowest point in the postwar era. To Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and other West German officials, Jimmy Carter's wavering earlier this month about whether to develop the weapon seemed to confirm their doubts about the President's ability to lead the alliance effectively. Although Schmidt was publicly muting the impact of the episode last week...
...Linguistic purists in the Pentagon insist that the neutron bomb is a warhead and not a bomb at all, but many military experts classify shells, warheads and other explosive weapons that come down on the enemy from the air as bombs. The word derives from the Greek bombos, meaning a deep hollow sound. In the earliest known use of the word in English, an anonymous translator of a Spanish treatise described in 1588 how the Chinese used "many bomes of fire, full of olde iron and arrowes made with powder & fire worke, with the which they do much harme...
...neutron bomb that is slated for production packs a one-kiloton punch. By contrast, most of the tactical nukes that are stockpiled in Europe come in sizes often, 20 and 50 kilotons. If a standard ten-kiloton warhead were detonated, it would level nearly every building within a radius of over a mile. A neutron bomb exploded 130 yds. in the air would destroy all structures within only a 140-yd. radius. It would instantly kill anyone within a half-mile radius, and for people within a one-mile range would cause delayed deaths up to a month after...
...initial talks were concerned with each side's fear that the other might find ways to cheat on any new agreement. The U.S. seeks some on-site means of detecting whether a missile is MIRVed - equipped to carry more than one independently targetable warhead -and wants the Russians to provide more information on its weapons generally and to agree to ban the deliberate concealment of launch sites. The Soviet negotiators seek assurance that the U.S. will not evade SALT limits by shipping weapons to its NATO allies...
...second and equally important phase of upgrading the Minuteman III will begin in the fall of 1979, when the missile's Mk-12 warhead will be replaced with the Mk-12A. Using miniaturized arming and fusing components, the new warhead will be able to contain enough payload to double its explosive yield from 170 kilotons to 350 kilotons of TNT. This is still far below the 1 megaton (1,000 kilotons) clout of each of the eight warheads carried in the huge SS-18 that the Soviet Union is already deploying. But, with the improved guidance system...