Word: blasts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...known as a cocaine center." Trinidad has, willy- nilly, become home to the U.S. 193rd Infantry Brigade. Transported from Panama two weeks ago, the G.I.s are embarked on an earnest mission: to help the Bolivian drug-enforcement unit, known as the Leopards, wipe out cocaine- processing factories. But "Operation Blast Furnace," which has flooded Trinidad with more than 170 soldiers, a dozen or so agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and representatives from 53 news organizations, has proved as confused an antic as in an Evelyn Waugh novel...
...astronauts probably survived the explosionand breakup of the shuttle orbiter and could havehad 6 to 15 seconds of "useful consciousness"inside the crew compartment after the blast, saidDr. Joseph Kerwin, an astronaut-physician whoinvestigated the cause of death for the crew...
Although the mission had a ferocious code name, "Operation Blast Furnace," it was apparently carried out under unwritten rules similar to those observed when federal revenue agents chased down Appalachian bootleggers: the etiquette dictated that no one on either side would really shoot to kill. U.S. troops, though armed with M-16 rifles, were under orders not to fire unless fired upon. Besides, the splash of unwanted publicity removed the surprise, ensuring that most of the big drug traffickers would be out of the country before the forces arrived. Said Bolivian Ambassador to the U.S. Fernando Illanes: "With...
Operation Blast Furnace, however, is the first product of a National Security Decision directive signed April 8 by President Reagan. The directive declared drug traffic into the U.S. to be a national security risk and authorized the use of military force against it. Before then, operations by the armed forces could be authorized only on a case-by-case basis through an emergency decree signed by the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General...
...There will be no major arrests and no political arrests. The effect will be zero. Within six months (Bolivian drug production) will be back to normal." That gloomy forecast about "Operation Blast Furnace" was offered last week by James Mills, 54, a veteran investigative reporter who has spent the past six years probing the shadowy world of international drug dealing and the seldom effective efforts of U.S. authorities to cope with it. Mills, author of the newly published The Underground Empire (Doubleday; 1,165 pages; $22.95), was in Washington to promote his book and appear before the House Foreign Affairs...