Signing up enhances your TCE experience with the ability to save items to your personal reading list, and access the interactive map. Armaments are fighting tools, including devices for surveillance and reconnaissance. The first armaments were probably jagged pieces of rock missile weapons and crude wooden clubs shock weapons , both instinctive adaptations of food-gathering implements. Eventually a combination created a battle axe or spear, which like most weapons could be used either offensively or defensively.
Wood or leather in the form of shield or body armour was purely defensive and of little value by itself. The variety of defensive armaments now ranges from spaced and layered steel and ceramic armour on tanks to airborne warning and command systems AWACS. Offensive weapons have become more complex and deadly, with greater range, accuracy and hitting power.
Modern missile weapon systems can be conveniently broken down into 3 components: a transportation and launching platform, a delivery mechanism and the missile itself. They range from the foot soldier bearing an automatic rifle to the nuclear-powered submersible carrying submarine-launched ballistic missiles SLBMs holding multiple, independently targeted re-entry vehicles MIRVs with atomic warheads, remote piloted vehicles RPVs and aircraft loaded with napalm, bombs or target-seeking missiles.
The high technology aspect of some current armaments, such as satellite reconnaissance and computerized laser range-finding and communications, makes it extremely difficult to distinguish in some instances between armaments and industrial tools. Space may become a battlefield of the future involving nuclear-powered lasers and other exotic devices. The American "strategic defense initiative" SDI , implemented by President Ronald Reagan in the s, was the first step toward establishing such defensive measures.
The program was abandoned in due to cost, lack of technological advances and the objections of other countries that the system could be used offensively. Archaeological evidence suggests that prehistoric armaments in North America developed in the same sequence as in other parts of the world.
