Electromagnetic Pulse

It is a proposal as irrepressible as the children's classic "The Little Engine That Could." And critics say it is just about as realistic. The United States, or so the proposal goes, should hide its land-based nuclear missiles inside cleverly disguised railroad cars, keep them in garrisons during peacetime and send them out to roam the nation's railroads in times of superpower crisis. Mingling unobtrusively with commercial traffic, the missile force would remain safe from Soviet attack and ready to do its deadly business at a moment's notice.

The Navy began zapping huge bursts of electricity across the Atlantic from a barge off North Carolina in the first stage of tests designed to see how ships can survive the electronic aftermath of nuclear explosions.

The Pentagon has been ordered to halt electromagnetic pulse tests--designed to simulate the effects of a nuclear blast--until it has studied the environmental and health effects of the high-energy experiments. In a federal court order signed Friday night, the Defense Department agreed to demands by a Washington environmental group to suspend the experiments until their effect on humans and wildlife is assessed.

Microchips, those sensitive Computer Age workhorses for everything from communications to defense, were in their infancy the night Starfish Prime lit the sky. A rocket carried the nuclear device 280 miles into the atmosphere over tiny Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, about 925 miles southwest of Hawaii. The 1.4-megaton nuclear detonation on July 9, 1962, was one of the last of its kind before the United States agreed to ban above-ground nuclear tests.