Word: barriers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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While the AEC stood still, military staffs and armchair strategists toyed (that seemed to be the word) with the possibilities of the atom. One current and quite plausible notion of how to keep the Red Army from seizing Europe: drop intensely poisonous atomic dust to form a barrier between the U.S.S.R. and the land to the west of it. Such a cordon might last for years; it would not, however, prevent the Russians from developing bacteriological weapons, possibly more deadly than the atom (see MEDICINE), which could be sent across the barrier...
...altogether for lack of trying. Behind the locked door of his Paris studio, 76-year-old Georges Rouault paints Christs as glowing and brittle as stained glass. They are done with devotion (Rouault is an ardent Catholic), but their deliberate crudity is almost as obvious a barrier to appreciation as the lock on his door. When British Sculptor Henry Moore was commissioned to carve a Madonna and Child for a church, he resolved to "meet the subject half way," as he put it, by substituting a limited realism for his usual smooth abstraction. The compromise was recognizably human...
...community to which they happen to be born, or worse still, on the color of their skin or the religion of their parents." The U.S. must have an educational system "in which at no level. . . will a qualified individual in any part of the country encounter an insuperable economic barrier to the attainment of the education best suited to his aptitudes." The commission's recommendations...
...theory Beck & Miles started with cockroaches, which wear their smellers conveniently on their antennae outside their bodies. They put oil of cloves vapor (attractive to cockroaches) behind a gas-tight window of material transparent to infrared. The cockroaches responded to it just about as strongly as if the barrier were not there. When a thin sheet of glass (opaque to infrared) was added to the barrier, the cockroaches showed no more interest in the window than when there was no oil of cloves behind...
Squabble. When U.S. air scientists heard the triumphant trumpetings of the British press, they protested that they, too, had shot rocket-driven missiles through the sonic barrier. So they had, but their missiles were even less airplanelike than Vicky. Even the initially controlled V-2 (which reaches nearly five times the speed of sound) is not supported by the air, as a genuine airplane must be. The U.S. Navy's ramjet, or "flying stovepipe," is merely a power plant boosted into the air for a brief, uncontrolled flight...