Word: 1950s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...essential ingredient in many atomic weapons, plutonium can also be used in specially designed nuclear plants, called breeder reactors, to reduce the amount of uranium needed to sustain fission. Back in the 1950s, the U.S., Japan and several European countries argued that breeder reactors should be the keystone of their nuclear-energy strategy because fissionable uranium was scarce and expensive. Since then the amount of conventional nuclear fuel has increased and the economic incentive for developing breeders has disappeared. Japan has kept its program going, however, despite the dangers of accidents or plutonium theft by terrorists...
...threat of disease is heightened by urban pollution. Brinkmann notes that in industrial countries, as much as 50% of the population will suffer from a rash or other skin disease during the course of a year, compared with maybe 2% in the 1950s. "Is this an indication that pollutants have weakened human immune defenses, leaving city dwellers more vulnerable to otherwise benign diseases?" the epidemiologist asks. Many of the effects of environmental degradation are far from benign. In Upper Silesia, Poland, indiscriminate dumping of toxic wastes has so poisoned the land and water that 10% of the region's newborns...
...feminism, especially in English-speaking countries, a threshold was crossed last week; but the broader cultural shift has been occurring for decades and is fast gaining momentum. In permitting the ordination of women, the Church of England joined a transformation that has altered other Protestant denominations since the early 1950s and that has already been embraced by the independent Anglican churches of Canada, New Zealand and the U.S., with Australia almost certain to take the step this week...
...world role, reform its priorities, recruit its strength was dismissed by Bush as isolationist -- which took the country further back than World War II, back to the rhetoric of the 1930s. It was a comparative advance toward modernity for Bush to re-enter the cold war of the 1950s by raising McCarthyite doubts about Clinton's trip to Moscow. At any rate it is hard to find anything new in Bush's new world order. Even before communism's fall, Reagan was far readier to imagine a different world arrangement, to adapt and dream, than Bush has been. The opportunity...
...returns to the working-class suburb of Sarcelles where, across from a busy train station, they live in a three-bedroom apartment with their daughter and son, ages 3 years and 18 months. The flat is cozy but small, typical of the low-rent units constructed back in the 1950s to house French families repatriated from North Africa. Together, the Bentzes take home $3,600 a month, not a lot for a family of four. Yet they are thinking of having a third child -- and, unlike many American parents, are not fretting about the potential costs. They know they...