Word: abrupt
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...control experts by announcing on NBC's Meet the Press that wide-open testing and even development of the space-based Strategic Defense Initiative, as Star Wars is formally named, is "approved and authorized" by the ABM treaty. "Only deployment (of SDI) is foreclosed," McFarlane claimed. This was an abrupt reversal of U.S. policy. Previously, everyone had assumed that Article V of the treaty meant what it said: the U.S. and the Soviet Union were committed "not to develop, test or deploy ABM systems or components." The Pentagon accordingly made tortuous refinements in its program to stay in compliance. Some...
Even so, the devaluation campaign is a gamble. There is some danger that it might be too successful, setting off a stampede from the dollar that would damage the U.S. In effect, Washington is relying on foreign buyers of Treasury bills and bonds to finance the U.S. budget deficit. Abrupt withdrawal of that capital could force the Government either to borrow more in domestic markets, bringing about a disastrous rise in interest rates, or to indulge in a highly inflationary expansion of the money supply...
...plates carrying two continental masses collide, for example, the crust buckles, creating craggy mountain ranges like the Himalayas. If they grind past each other, as the Pacific and North American plates do under California's San Andreas fault, friction locks them together. Every so often, abrupt slippages occur and the earth around them shudders in what geologists call strike-slip quakes. Still another kind of tectonic phenomenon, the meeting of an oceanic and a continental plate, is responsible for the Mexican disaster...
...latter actions represent an abrupt departure from long-standing University policy. Indeed, they fundamentally contradict explicit principles that have defined Bok's stance since 1979. These actions suggest a breakdown of the president's logic or resolve and place his opposition to divestment in a perilously vulnerable position...
...party's so-called third echelon (see box) could be named to the 24-member Politburo, while between 30 and 50 newcomers could replace party veterans on the 210-member Central Committee. Says a middle-level official: "The changes will be part of a flowing movement rather than an abrupt one, but they will be substantial and profound." Deng, who knows full well that no program of reforms is irreversible, put it crisply when he told a group of visiting Japanese legislators, "We will guarantee the continuity of the policy currently in force in China...