Word: atomization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most laymen, the explosions of scientific knowledge in the 20th century have been chiefly felt as ominous aftershocks. The splitting of the atom, after all, led to nuclear bombs. The breaking of the genetic code of the DNA molecule raises nightmares about malevolent new designer viruses escaping from laboratories and running wild. And the Big Bang theory of the universe's origin suggests two possible conclusions, both of them unpleasant: infinite expansion, with a concurrent dispersal of heat and an annihilating deep freeze; or eventual contraction and a horrendous Big Crunch...
Physicist Edward Teller has a reputation for thinking big: during World War II, as other Manhattan Project scientists were racing to build the first atom bomb, the Hungarian-born Teller was already working on the hydrogen bomb. While the H-bomb was both a technological tour de force and a hellishly effective weapon, however, one of Teller's more recent enthusiasms -- the X- ray laser -- could turn out to be an expensive dud. That possibility has ignited a fire storm of accusations that has set off a federal investigation into recent goings-on at the University of California's Lawrence...
Abbie Hoffman, founding father of the Yippies and still, at 51, a social activist, has an arresting theory about time and the stages of human development. "The world really began for us," his idea goes, "on Aug. 6, 1945, when the atom bomb was dropped. So that during the '60s we were all young. The whole world was going through its youth, its atomic youth. If you looked at the magazines at the time, they were all youth oriented, and the culture was all youth oriented." Today, says Hoffman, it is not only that the baby boomers are getting middle...
Partly because of the relative ease of developing -- and disguising -- such armaments, at least 16 countries may already have the "poor man's atom bomb." Among them: Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Says Kenneth Adelman, former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency: "If there are a lot of crazy countries in the world that have chemical weapons and have not agreed to ban them, it makes no sense for the U.S. to give up a deterrent chemical- weapons force...
...part of a group of American observers who stood in the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nitze contemplated the implications of the atom bomb for the postwar world. His conclusion: once the Soviets got their own bomb, they might use it as an instrument of political intimidation and perhaps of war; to deter Soviet aggression, the U.S. would have to build up its own conventional and nuclear military strength. That has been the nub of his message to his countrymen ever since...