Word: bastion
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...stronghold, isolated between the Red River delta and Laos, was even more a psychological than a military pivot of the war. The French seized the saucer last November, built it into a bastion with a tireless airlift and talked of sucking the forces of wily Communist General Vo Nguyen Giap into an attack that they felt might hurt him sorely. For Giap, on the other hand, Dienbienphu became a challenge; to reduce the fortress could well deal a deadly blow to France's resolve to fight on in Indo-China...
Today the Harvard community stands, almost alone, as a final bastion of academic freedom. Amid the hoots and jibes of intellectual muckers and muckrakers, with the tocsin of false alarm gleefully tolled in state and national legislatures, each student must prepare himself to carry the weight of freedom. Harvard independence has been extolled by its alumni, exhorted by its deans, and recently received the accolade (if not the coup de grace) of recognition by Henry Luce...
Unfettered by American protests, Spain insists that modern armaments have made British fortifications on the bastion useless. Yet NATO experts regard the underground defenses of the Rock as secure as man can devise, and consider Gibraltar a vital point in the regulation of trade and supply routes to the Mediterranean. Solely on the basis of defense policy, the British have good reason to keep a tight grip on Gibraltar...
...Pakistan is perhaps America's best friend between Turkey and the Philippines; it has no illusions about Communism and, given help, might be made into the free world's South Asian bastion. ¶ Pakistan's 13-division army, re-equipped, could hold the Khyber Pass. ¶ From Pakistan's air bases, particularly the two great British-built airfields near Karachi, the U.S. Air Force would be within jet-bomber range of the Karaganda-Alma Ata refuge of Soviet industry, far beyond the Ural Mountains. ¶ A pact between the U.S. and Pakistan might spur other Moslem...
...baked Suez base that sprawls for 90 miles along the canal banks, British spotter planes droned last week, alert for Egyptian concentrations. Big, Sunderland flying boats rumbled in from Malta with 600 commandos to beef up the 80,000 British troops already crammed into Britain's Middle East bastion. All home leaves were canceled; British soldiers took over local water and power plants and set up checkpoints flanked by machine-gun nests, sandbags and barbed wire...