Word: apparatus
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...piano notes travels much farther than the high-pitched beeps of early sonar. But generating enough such noise under water is a large problem. The Navy's latest shipboard sonar weighs 30 tons and consumes 1,600 times as much power as the standard postwar sonar. The listening apparatus is trickier because the long, slow waves that echo from targets require computers to interpret them correctly. But the detection problem is considered licked, since the new equipment has many times the range of earlier sonars-enough for catching nukes under most combat conditions...
...effectiveness in battle, the brigades were an international showpiece. Also, except for the Communists among them, who presumably knew what they were doing, they were all betrayed by Moscow; the volunteers discovered, mostly too late, that they were conscripts in a Communist task force with the most loathsome rearechelon apparatus in the history of warfare-with political commissars, kangaroo courts, execution squads and torture cells. The international brigades so provided a fair percentage of the number (more than 7,000) killed in the civil war behind the lines. In this figure, Thomas credits the Loyalists with being twice as bloodthirsty...
...sure, the superefficient police-state apparatus was not yet dismantled. At military check points, troops stopped all passing cars; and Ramfis, increasingly suspicious that the assassination was part of a large-scale plot, replaced key commanders with trusted cronies from his air force. Most of the assassins of Old Man Trujillo were either in jail or dead. And there were widespread reports that the dragnet had swept up entire households, including the servants...
Having analyzed the moth's sonar-detecting apparatus in the laboratory, Roeder and Treat tried it out in the field against real bats. They set up their apparatus on a Massachusetts hillside, and at nightfall their wired moth began to detect the ultrasonic cries of bats. From the traces on their oscillograph, the biologists could tell whether an invisible bat was approaching or flying away. Later, when Roeder and Treat turned on a powerful floodlight, they could watch the bats diving on their prey and hear, through the captive moth's ear, the bats' searching sonar beeps...
Many men with natural distinction of mind-Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Whittaker Chambers and Gustav Regler -have tried to read the Marxist riddle. By what stages does the self-sacrificing zeal of the idealist recruit to Communism become converted into the coldly inhuman amorality of the full-fledged apparatus man in the party's higher echelons? What turns the Utopian dream of universal brotherhood into the nightmare reality of the police state...