Word: bomb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Physicist Edward Teller has a reputation for thinking big: during World War II, as other Manhattan Project scientists were racing to build the first atom bomb, the Hungarian-born Teller was already working on the hydrogen bomb. While the H-bomb was both a technological tour de force and a hellishly effective weapon, however, one of Teller's more recent enthusiasms -- the X- ray laser -- could turn out to be an expensive dud. That possibility has ignited a fire storm of accusations that has set off a federal investigation into recent goings-on at the University of California's Lawrence...
...Livermore Director Roger Batzel in what Woodruff claims was retaliation for trying to put a lid on Teller. Prior to his transfer, Woodruff was responsible for proposed SDI weapons like the X-ray laser, a device that was supposed to channel the intense X rays from a nuclear bomb into a beam of radiation. In theory, the X rays would be capable of destroying enemy ICBMs in mid-flight. But tests showed that although such devices work on a small scale, there was little evidence that they could be made powerful enough to work as effective antimissile weapons...
Abbie Hoffman, founding father of the Yippies and still, at 51, a social activist, has an arresting theory about time and the stages of human development. "The world really began for us," his idea goes, "on Aug. 6, 1945, when the atom bomb was dropped. So that during the '60s we were all young. The whole world was going through its youth, its atomic youth. If you looked at the magazines at the time, they were all youth oriented, and the culture was all youth oriented." Today, says Hoffman, it is not only that the baby boomers are getting middle...
...Hoffman hypothesis of atomic aging, the world was about 22 years old. The baby-boom generation, not only in America but in much of the rest of the world, grew up not merely in the shadow of the Bomb but also in an envelope of common experiences. Television gave them a collective memory -- of Howdy Doody and Beaver Cleaver, of public events (most vividly and traumatically, the assassination of President John Kennedy). Then, in the mid- and later '60s, the young endlessly enriched and elaborated their culture, through music mainly and through drugs and costume and linguistic style (groovy...
Partly because of the relative ease of developing -- and disguising -- such armaments, at least 16 countries may already have the "poor man's atom bomb." Among them: Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Says Kenneth Adelman, former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency: "If there are a lot of crazy countries in the world that have chemical weapons and have not agreed to ban them, it makes no sense for the U.S. to give up a deterrent chemical- weapons force...