Word: atomize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...proliferation. For almost 16 years, the country's strongman, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, has been supporting international terrorism and devising schemes to worry the West. Were a nuclear weapon or two to fall into his hands, his capacity for troublemaking would increase intolerably. In 1981 Gaddafi told TIME that the atom bomb was "a means of terrorizing humanity, and we are against the manufacture and acquisition of nuclear weapons." A few days later he reportedly told his top advisers that he planned to channel a substantial amount of Libya's financial resources into obtaining a nuclear weapon...
Though Libya is nowhere near achieving that goal, it has not been for lack of trying. Even before he signed the nonproliferation treaty in 1975, Gaddafi began hatching proposals. In 1970 he sent a top aide, Abdul Salam Jalloud, to Peking in an attempt to buy an atom bomb. China turned him down. Beginning in 1973 the colonel helped bankroll part of Pakistan's bombmaking effort, and even before he was rebuffed several years later by President Mohammed Zia ul- Haq, he had started to make overtures to Pakistan's archenemy, India. When New Delhi restricted the extent of nuclear...
...most recent research development may actually be something of an embarrassment to the Administration. Reagan has laid great stress on developing a "nonnuclear" defense, but the strongest laser beams that might eventually be used to destroy missiles are X-ray laser beams -- and they are produced by detonating atom bombs. In underground tests of an atomic device in Nevada, researchers are said to have considerably increased the brightness of X-ray laser beams, which would greatly extend their potential missile-killing range. Research into X-ray laser beams at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California goes by the name...
...sense." He cautions, however, that the obstacles to developing an actual weapon are "fantastic," and repeated last week his view that SDI threatens "a big new escalation" in the arms race. For good measure, he took a swipe at Edward Teller, his colleague from the World War II atom-bomb project who is now a promoter of Star Wars in general and X-ray lasers in particular. Teller, said Bethe, was the scientist "who brought us the H-bomb with the statement that it will...
Missile-guidance computer programs so complex that they can be written and tested only by other computer programs. A laser weapon that can release death rays in the nanoseconds before it is obliterated by its own power source, an atom bomb. A jet fighter that can understand the pilot's spoken commands...