Word: bomb
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That was hardly a compelling excuse for the slipshod embassy security (see box), especially since there had been public threats from a terrorist group that it would attack U.S. installations in Beirut. Moreover, the previous truck-bomb assaults (at the original West Beirut embassy on April 18, 1983, and the Marine headquarters near the airport last Oct. 23) should have been lesson enough that greater security was needed...
...evident that something more than methodology separates Coles from those he criticizes. What is at issue is how research about children and the bomb is being used, and what conclusions are being drawn from the body of findings out there, preliminary as they may be. Coles' main point is to suggest the self-fulfilling nature of much of the work conducted thus far, and here he takes a cautious line in analyzing the motives of his colleagues. But there is no escaping the unstated implications of his research: psychiatrists have been veering dangerously close to abusing their profession by forcing...
...inaccessibility of psychiatry to the layman. Who really knows what can be in the mind of a child? Our understanding of the difficulty of knowing this, knowing this in a real sense, causes us to sympathize with the efforts, however clumsy, to get closer to an understanding of the bomb's psychological impact. The danger is in generalizing from this inadequate research and using this research to further a political agenda which allows its adherents to make often-outrageous moral claims upon the citizenry...
Coles gently hints at this danger in a discussion of the phenomenon of "denial" or "psychic numbing," which appears in much of the literature on psychology and the bomb, and which is cited by leading disarmament advocates like Dr. Helen Caldicott as an explanation for why some people don't seem to be all that fazed by our nuclear arsenals. The implication of this analysis, Coles writes, is that certain people are not facing up to the reality of the nuclear arms race, and have instead "resorted to what are often called 'primitive psychological defense mechanisms,' presumably unworthy of intelligent...
...about the psychological impact of nuclear war becomes less an intellectual exercise than an exercise in pushing the freeze, a defensible but separate proposition. What was a legitimate and important research agenda becomes increasingly hostage to a political agenda, because the only thing about investigations of children and the bomb that can be defended now, Coles implies, is the politics of the matter, not the research. And psychiatrists are no better politicians than the rest...