Word: battleships
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...Navy has been the nation's favorite means of flexing its muscles. A 1976 survey by the Brookings Institution found that in the 215 cases since World War II in which military force was used for political goals, the Navy was deployed 177 times. A visit by the battleship Missouri to Istanbul in 1946 countered mounting Soviet pressures on Turkey, for example, while in 1958 U.S. amphibious activity off Lebanon's coast bolstered a friendly government in Beirut. More recently, the rescue of the U.S. freighter Mayaguez in 1975 after its capture by Cambodian Communists demonstrated America's continuing interest...
...Gone forever is the battleship. The last of them, the U.S.S. Wisconsin, was retired in 1958, although the U.S.S. New Jersey was briefly taken out of mothballs ten years later and deployed off the coast of South Viet Nam until December...
...advocate abandoning the flanks of NATO." On most other points, however, the Navy's critics continue to reject the service's arguments, stressing that the carriers have become extraordinarily vulnerable when they push close to the Soviet Union. Just as the introduction of sea-based aircraft eventually ended the battleship's reign, so the cruise missile, with its potential for pinpoint accuracy at long range, will doom the big-deck carrier. The Consolidated Guidance maintains it has become "dubious at best" that the Navy's carriers could survive off the coast of Norway, where they are certain to be blitzed...
...never know; as usual, TRB this week is a sprawling symphony of erudition, indignation, historical allusion and harmonic prose. His overture to a diatribe against the two-thirds Senate majority requirement for treaty approval: ''I don't know whether to start this piece with an American battleship dashing round the Horn in wartime, a biologist slicing the salivary gland of a female mosquito, a volcanic eruption killing 30,000 people . . . or the vote of the United States Senate last week on the Panama Canal...
...Moore won the Distinguished Service Order as a young navigator for destroyer flotillas at the Battle of Jutland in World War I. But his finest hour came in April 1944, when, as a vice admiral, he directed a crippling aircraft carrier attack on Hitler's last remaining giant battleship, the 45,000-ton Tirpitz, as it lay in a Norwegian fjord...