Word: aptness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years after Stalin's death, at a scientific summit conference in Geneva in 1955, that Westerners first realized that a great change had come over their Soviet colleagues. At previous conferences, the Russians spoke only Russian, kept to themselves, and if asked a specific question, were apt to feign ignorance. But at Geneva, they were magpie-ready to talk. Aerodynamic Expert Gunther Bock, one of the German scientists taken to Russia after the war, went home to report that "in branches of science where Marxism-Leninism is not directly applicable, there is no feeling of oppression. I could discuss...
...institutes and observatories are run by superannuated fuddy-duddies. The University of Rochester's R. E. Marshak was amazed "at how young Russian physicists did not hesitate to call to task distinguished academicians if points of difference arose," but in many fields it is the young who are apt to make the decisive leaps...
...crash-priority psychology, which often achieves spectacular results, also produced absurdities. Though lavish, laboratory equipment is apt to be overengineered, clumsy and wasteful. Says a British physicist of one laboratory: "The men in charge just sat down with a catalogue and ordered whatever they wanted. There was one fine electron-microscope that they said they hadn't gotten around to using yet, though it had been there a year...
...soldier. General Paul Ely, chief of the joint chiefs, resigned in protest. The nation's 280.000 hardbitten police, who constitute a virtual army in themselves, still seemed loyal to the Fourth Republic. Paris, ringed by its famed "Red belt" of industrial suburbs, was as apt to be dominated by leftist mobs, if it came to that, as by the rightist mobs that rioted in Algiers...
...accept barter instead of hard cash, often find Russian goods shoddy, Soviet maintenance poor. But so long as the threat of a congressional cutback in U.S. aid and trade programs and increasing pressure for more U.S. tariffs on basic commodities exist, the attractions of the Soviet lure are apt to become even stronger. U.S. business will not only lose some of its present markets, but, far more important, will be kept out of the markets of the future...