Word: basement
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...instant, the tornado was upon them. Unable to reach their basement because of the glass shards whipping through the air, the Gosnells huddled on the floor. By the time the storm abated, a stop sign poked through the ceiling of their son's room and an exercise machine had been transplanted from their bedroom to their daughter's. The front yard looked freshly plowed and the few trees still standing had been stripped of their leaves. The Gosnell's hometown of Atlantic, Pa. (pop. 225), had been leveled, its feed mill, post office, general store and gas station all destroyed...
...exceptional case, Washington's attitude toward Jerusalem, as Van Doren puts it, "could prove to be the Achilles' heel of our nonproliferation policy." Other would- be nuclear powers cannot fail to note the high levels of U.S. economic and military assistance bestowed on Israel despite its bomb-in-the-basement status and draw their own conclusions about the universal sincerity of U.S. antiproliferation efforts...
Some of the phantoms are widely assumed to have atom bombs already or to be close to that goal. The major example of that ambiguous status known as having "a bomb in the basement" is Israel. The Israelis probably developed an atomic weapon as early as 1968, in all likelihood using reprocessed plutonium from their top-secret, French-built research reactor at Dimona, in the Negev desert. By 1973, Israel was believed to possess at least 13 nuclear weapons...
Another candidate for bomb-in-the-basement status, South Africa, announced in 1970 that it had developed a new process for uranium enrichment. Since then the government in Pretoria has fiercely protected its putative breakthrough from virtually all curious foreign eyes. In 1977 the Soviet Union, apparently acting on evidence received from one of its spy satellites, notified the U.S. of an installation in South Africa's Kalahari Desert that resembled a nuclear test site under construction. Washington used one of its own satellites to inspect further. Four months later, under pressure from the U.S., South Africa stopped work...
...when guys cheat on their wives and the other way around, stuff like that. When I was little, I had all the usual feelings of guilt. I was very conscious of God watching everything I did. Until I was eleven or twelve, I believed the devil was in my basement and I would run up the stairway fast so he wouldn't grab my ankles. We had the kind of stairway where there were spaces between each step...