Earth II is a 1971 pilot, aired November 28 (and released theatrically outside North America), for a television series about a colony established in orbit around the Earth. A WABE Production in association with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Television, it starred Gary Lockwood, Scott Hylands and Hari Rhodes. The film was written and produced by William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter, and directed by Tom Gries.
Three men are launched from Cape Kennedy in a typical Apollo-style launch; a "Red Chinese" agent is killed in the water nearby before he can sabotage the rocket launch.
The President (Lew Ayres) of the United States announces that the three men and their ship will be the nucleus of a new nation, and asks Americans to turn their lights on that night to show support for the project. The astronauts take photos of the Earth's surface as they orbit, to be processed later to determine the level of public support for the idea within the conterminous 48 states. The results indicate widespread support for a new nation in outer space.
The movie skips ahead several years to show a shuttle approaching a space station, a huge, rotating city known as Earth II, with technology at its disposal that makes it fairly easy to maneuver around the city and supply it and the thousands– from many nations— now living aboard. There is a family aboard the shuttle –Frank, Lisa and Matt Karger– who are new immigrants to the colony.
Shortly after arrival, Earth II's administrators, including David Seville (Lockwood), become aware of a nuclear warhead in orbit that comes close to Earth II every few hours. The warhead was launched by the People's Republic of China. Earth II requests a meeting with PRC representatives through the UN (of which Earth II is a member nation); at the meeting, the PRC refuses to remove the weapon and threatens to detonate it if it is tampered with.
Earth II has a televised direct democracy process known as a "D&D" –Discussion and Decision. The newly arrived Frank Karger (Franciosa) initiates a D&D to decide on how to deal with the warhead. After some of the citizens, including Russian emigre Ilyana Kovalefskii (Inga Swenson) make their statements (the logic of which is noted on-screen by a computer), the vote is to act.
Two men, including Ilyana's husband Anton (Edward Bell) go out in a tug to deactivate the warhead, but Anton receives an electric shock when the Chinese activate the weapon. The weapon does not explode, however, as Kovalefskii had already cut several wires in the arming device. The tug operator rescues the technician, discards his tool caddies, secures the bomb and brings both back to Earth II. Ilyana is told that Anton will be disabled for life as a result of his injuries unless surgery is attempted. Ilyana approves the surgery.
Meanwhile, Lisa Karger (Hartley) doesn't want the bomb aboard, and is alarmed at Frank's intent to initiate a D&D on Earth II becoming a nuclear power. When told that one way to dispose of the bomb is to fire it at the Sun, Lisa blows the hatch cover on the holding bay, waits for the Sun to come into the view, and launches the bomb at it. The Earth's gravitational pull is greater however, the bomb falls toward the Earth and will detonate over the Great Lakes region.
Ilyana observes the operation on her husband– in an operating room with medical personnel standing on both the floor and ceiling– sadly, Anton abruptly dies immediately thereafter.
The tug operator retrieves the warhead, but not before the warhead's casing has disintegrated in the Earth's atmosphere. The bomb is brought back and put into the same holding bay. Station rotation is slowed as much as possible while a crew works to permanently deactivate the bomb. The city is still rotating enough to bring the Sun into view through the opening and the temperature is rising, threatening to melt safeties and detonate the bomb. A pilot takes a tug out and puts its nose against one of the main struts of the city, then fires its engines to stop rotation altogether.
With the Sun's light partly shining into the holding bay, the temperature is at a crucial level. The technicians find melted metal that makes it necessary to drill in order to remove some components. The disarming is completed, the rotation of the city is restarted. Frank Karger relents and is no longer intent to call for a D&D on Earth II's nuclear weapons status, and the bomb is properly launched toward the Sun for disposal.
We see in the movie that even toy guns are prohibited on the station, and that the communications port in an apartment is used for both the television receiver and the telephone –Frank has to mute the television to answer the phone next to it. The operating room in the hospital has support staff standing on the ceiling to aid the doctors.
Very shortly after the movie was produced, and 34 days before it was broadcast, the United Nations voted October 25 to expel the representatives of the Taiwan-based Republic of China (an original member since 1945) and admit the Beijing-based representatives of the People's Republic of China (founded 1949) in its place. Thus, the movie was geopolitically outdated when broadcast.
The map used in the control center is a Dymaxion Map, designed by R. Buckminster Fuller, who was also listed in the credits as "Technical Advisor for Earth."
An intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is a ballistic missile with a range greater than 5,500 kilometres (3,400 mi), primarily designed for nuclear weapons delivery. Conventional, chemical, and biological weapons can also be delivered with varying effectiveness, but have never been deployed on ICBMs. Most modern designs support multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRVs), allowing a single missile to carry several warheads, each of which can strike a different target. Russia, the United States, China, France, India, the United Kingdom, Israel, and North Korea are the only countries known to have operational ICBMs.
A thermobaric weapon, also called an aerosol bomb, a vacuum bomb, or a fuel air explosive (FAE), is a type of explosive that uses oxygen from the surrounding air to generate a high-temperature explosion. The fuel–air explosive is one of the best-known types of thermobaric weapons.
Nuclear warfare, also known as atomic warfare, is a theoretical military conflict or prepared political strategy that deploys nuclear weaponry. Nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction; in contrast to conventional warfare, nuclear warfare can produce destruction in a much shorter time and can have a long-lasting radiological result. A major nuclear exchange would likely have long-term effects, primarily from the fallout released, and could also lead to secondary effects, such as "nuclear winter", nuclear famine and societal collapse. A global thermonuclear war with Cold War-era stockpiles, or even with the current smaller stockpiles, may lead to various scenarios including the extinction of the human race.
Anti-satellite weapons (ASAT) are space weapons designed to incapacitate or destroy satellites for strategic or tactical purposes. Although no ASAT system has yet been utilised in warfare, a few countries have successfully shot down their own satellites to demonstrate their ASAT capabilities in a show of force. ASATs have also been used to remove decommissioned satellites.
The nuclear arms race was an arms race competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies during the Cold War. During this same period, in addition to the American and Soviet nuclear stockpiles, other countries developed nuclear weapons, though none engaged in warhead production on nearly the same scale as the two superpowers.
Project A119, also known as A Study of Lunar Research Flights, was a top-secret plan developed in 1958 by the United States Air Force. The aim of the project was to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon, which would help in answering some of the mysteries in planetary astronomy and astrogeology. If the explosive device detonated on the surface, and not in a lunar crater, the flash of explosive light would have been faintly visible to people on Earth with their naked eye. This was meant as a show of force resulting in a possible boosting of domestic morale in the capabilities of the United States, a boost that was needed after the Soviet Union took an early lead in the Space Race and was also working on a similar project.
A Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) is a warhead delivery system that uses a low earth orbit towards its target destination. Just before reaching the target, it deorbits through a retrograde engine burn.
Space weapons are weapons used in space warfare. They include weapons that can attack space systems in orbit, attack targets on the earth from space or disable missiles travelling through space. In the course of the militarisation of space, such weapons were developed mainly by the contesting superpowers during the Cold War, and some remain under development today. Space weapons are also a central theme in military science fiction and sci-fi video games.
The United States was the first country to manufacture nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in combat, with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. Before and during the Cold War, it conducted 1,054 nuclear tests, and tested many long-range nuclear weapons delivery systems.
A thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb is a second-generation nuclear weapon design. Its greater sophistication affords it vastly greater destructive power than first-generation nuclear bombs, a more compact size, a lower mass, or a combination of these benefits. Characteristics of nuclear fusion reactions make possible the use of non-fissile depleted uranium as the weapon's main fuel, thus allowing more efficient use of scarce fissile material such as uranium-235 or plutonium-239. The first full-scale thermonuclear test was carried out by the United States in 1952; the concept has since been employed by most of the world's nuclear powers in the design of their weapons.
The militarization of space involves the placement and development of weaponry and military technology in outer space. The early exploration of space in the mid-20th century had, in part, a military motivation, as the United States and the Soviet Union used it as an opportunity to demonstrate ballistic-missile technology and other technologies having the potential for military application. Outer space has since been used as an operating location for military spacecraft such as imaging and communications satellites, and some ballistic missiles pass through outer space during their flight. As of 2018, known deployments of weapons stationed in space include only the Almaz space-station armament and pistols such as the TP-82 Cosmonaut survival pistol.
Nuclear weapons delivery is the technology and systems used to place a nuclear weapon at the position of detonation, on or near its target. Several methods have been developed to carry out this task.
Project 596, was the first nuclear weapons test conducted by the People's Republic of China, detonated on 16 October 1964, at the Lop Nur test site. It was a uranium-235 implosion fission device made from weapons-grade uranium (U-235) enriched in a gaseous diffusion plant in Lanzhou.
Fēngyún are China's meteorological satellites. Launched since 1988 into polar sun-synchronous and geosynchronous orbit, each three-axis stabilized Fengyun satellite is built by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST) and operated by the China Meteorological Administration (CMA). To date, China has launched nineteen Fengyun satellites in four classes. Fengyun 1 and Fengyun 3 satellites are in polar sun-synchronous orbit while Fengyun 2 and 4 are geosynchronous orbit.
Artificial satellites in low inclination orbits are rarely placed in retrograde orbit. This is partly due to the extra velocity required to launch into orbit against the direction of the Earth's rotation.
In military munitions, a fuze is the part of the device that initiates function. In some applications, such as torpedoes, a fuze may be identified by function as the exploder. The relative complexity of even the earliest fuze designs can be seen in cutaway diagrams.
North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear detonation on 6 January 2016 at 10:00:01 UTC+08:30. At the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site, approximately 50 kilometres northwest of Kilju City in Kilju County, an underground nuclear test was carried out. The United States Geological Survey reported a 5.1 magnitude earthquake from the location; the China Earthquake Networks Center reported the magnitude as 4.9.
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