Word: atomically
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GOVERNMENT AGENCIES assigned a particular task often pursue it with a single-mindedness, an inertia, that precludes any kind of dissent. In his new book. The Cult of the Atom, Daniel Ford shows that this bureaucratic blindness is now here more apparent than in the case of the Atomic Energy Commission. Set up in 1946, the A.E.C. took on the task of overseeing and encouraging the development of the American nuclear power industry...
...tremendous confidence in the potential of the "peaceful atom" prevailed after World War II Proponents foresaw an "Age of Plenty" in which weather would be atomically controlled, cars would travel for years on small pellets of uranium, and the moon would be only a short distance away via atomic powered vehicles. One of the chairmen of the Commission even forecast that electricity would probably be "too cheap to meter" The A.E.C. has spent the last three decades trying to fulfill these high hopes, but, as Ford shows, the intentions have gone dangerously astray...
DIED. Edith H. Quimby, 91, biophysicist whose research helped to pinpoint the optimal dosage of radiation for various medical purposes, particularly its use in cancer therapy; in New York City. Part of the atom bomb-building Manhattan Project during World War II, she was nonetheless a Cassandra who warned about the dangers of radiation as early as the 1920s...
...Theodore M. Hesburgh at Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia: "The nuclear threat is indeed the greatest moral problem of all times. For Theodore Hesburgh the years of the nuclear age, we humans have been painting ourselves into a corner. As Albert Einstein said, 'The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.' Perhaps the worst attitude is to say that nothing can be done about it, that tensions between nations cannot be relieved, that the ultimate destiny of all that is good and true and beautiful...
...burglary attempt." The cause (a moment of incompetent political espionage) did not seem commensurate with the effect (the resignation of the President), not in the usual Newtonian laws of action and reaction. Watergate was more like an event in quantum physics. A particle of history as minuscule as an atom produced a cataclysm...