Word: warheads
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...subsonic air-breathing missile was a sound concept before physicists found out how to fit a nuclear warhead into a ballistic missile. Had the Air Force's air-breathing Snark been pushed to completion on its original schedule three years ago, it could have filled a gap in U.S. air strength. By the time the first (and only) Snark wing was put into operation this year in Maine, Soviet defenses had more than caught up with it. Counting total development costs ($740 million), the Snark is one of the most costly, wings ever formed...
...second generation of solid-fuel missiles, designed for mass production and mass deployment through the mid-1960s, must have smaller, higher-yield thermonuclear warheads to fit their smaller nose cones. The Navy's Polaris engineers managed to test their bird's initial warhead just before the moratorium, but could not test its higher-yield follow-up warhead; the Air Force's Minuteman (see SCIENCE) and the Army's Pershing are being developed at a cost of millions to fit warheads that have not been tested, and, under the moratorium, may not be. All these tests could...
...permit nearly as much heat to pass through it. A Pyrographite nose cone, for instance, spreads the heat of air friction over a large area and permits it to be radiated harmlessly away, but it does not let heat strike through the cone and damage the sensitive instruments or warhead inside...
...October 1958, has discovered that underground explosions below 20 kilotons (about Hiroshima size) cannot accurately be detected by known seismographic instruments (TIME, Jan. 12). Meanwhile, the U.S. has had to hold up development of "clean" (low-fallout) bombs and smaller thermonuclear weapons. Sample result: a delay in the smaller warhead for the second-generation Minuteman intercontinental missile...
...space lag has its roots in the pre-Eisenhower era, beginning with the inability of President Harry Truman's scientific advisers, back in the mid-1940's to see any future in ballistic missiles. To carry a payload as big as a nuclear warhead, the scientists argued, a ballistic missile would have to be uneconomically bulky. So the U.S. channeled its missile efforts into now-obsolescent air-breathing missiles-Snark, Navaho, Regulus, etc.-that were inherently useless for space work. Meanwhile, the Russians were pushing ahead with ballistic missiles. By 1953, when a team of U.S. physicists headed...