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emergency alert systems

I. N.E.A.R Device – Nuclear Emergency Alarm Repeater 1945

II. EBS – Emergency Broadcasting System – 1963 to 1997

III. EAS – Emergency Alert System – 1997 to present

 

NEAR device

I. N.E.A.R Device – 1945

N.E.A.R. Device
AIRING: Season 7, Episode 9
THE DETECTIVE: Gwen Wright
THE PLACE: Westminster, Colorado

THE CASE:

History Detectives peers inside a black box that may shed light on some of the darkest days of the Cold War.  The US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 raised the stakes of modern warfare.

Almost immediately after World War Two, America’s former ally, the U.S.S.R., became her Cold War archenemy.  the Soviet Union’s surprise testing of its own atomic bomb in 1949 helped trigger a nuclear arms race, with each side pursuing ever more costly and deadly technologies.

More than sixty years after the start of the Cold War, Wayne Gilbert, of Westminster, Colorado, has stumbled across an interesting discovery. Was this device invented to help Americans believe they could survive a soviet nuclear attack?

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third person point of view

Point of view is the perspective from which a story is told. We may choose to tell our story in

    * first person, using "I" or "we";
    * third person ("he," "she," "it"), which can be limited or omniscient; or
    * second person, "you," the least common point of view.

As a writer, you must think strategically to choose the point of view that will allow you to most effectively develop your characters and tell your story.

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volley guns – duck’s foot

19th-century volley guns

3 barrel duck's foot
3 barrel duck’s foot

A few hand-held volley guns were also developed during the 18th and 19th centuries. One of the most distinctive was the “duck’s-foot” volley gun, a pistol with four .45 calibre barrels arranged in a splayed pattern, so that the firer could spray a sizable area with a single shot.

The principle behind this type of pistol is one of confrontation by one person against a group; hence, it was popular among bank guards, prison warders and sea captains in the 1800s and early 1900s. The British Royal Navy used gunsmith Henry Nock of London’s volley gun around the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

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