Word: atomize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There's a radiant moment in Tom Stoppard's Hapgood , which opened in revival last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, when Kerner, a Russian physicist and spy, celebrates the littleness of atoms. The public, he explains to the woman he loves, simply doesn't comprehend how minuscule the particles truly are. He tells her, "I could put an atom into your hand for every second since the world began, and you would have to squint to see the dot of atoms in your palm." Some men offer their beloved the moon. Kerner offers his a speck in her palm...
...material had been sent to the plant in the 1970s to be made into fuel rods for Soviet naval vessels. While the Soviets had abandoned it as their union collapsed in 1991, it remained quite a prize: there was enough nuclear material there to spawn as many as 36 atom bombs...
...Treaty and replace old nuclear-power plants that produce weapons-grade plutonium in exchange for a big payoff: free fuel oil and $4 billion (mostly put up by South Korea and Japan) to build safer light-water reactors that yield a type of plutonium more difficult to fashion into atom bombs. Hans Blix, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, complained about a "long and complex, difficult road" to be traveled during the five years it will take before Pyongyang opens its suspect sites to inspection. Bringing the accord into full effect will take a decade. Some critics called...
...angry attacks. Republican Senate leader Bob Dole asserted that it only proved the U.S. could always get an agreement if it gave away enough. Main points: rewarding North Korea for giving up its nuclear program sets a bad precedent if, say, Iran should some day announce it is building atom bombs. And at any time during the next 10 years or so, the Pyongyang regime could break the agreement and resume building a nuclear arsenal. Clinton noted that North Korea would then lose all future benefits in oil and reactor-building money. A more conclusive defense: since the U.S. discovered...
...Smithsonian Institution succumbed to mounting criticism from Congress, veterans and historians and announced it would revise its planned exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary next year of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Originally focused narrowly on the bombings, which killed more than 200,000 Japanese, the exhibit will now cover Japan's aggression during World War II and factors that influenced the decision to drop the Bomb, including U.S. military leaders' belief that an invasion of the Japanese mainland would leave hundreds of thousands of dead on both sides...