Word: bomb
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...considered using the Bomb in Suez, and we did use it diplomatically. The Russians called on us to join them in sending a combined force to drive the British and French out of the area. Eisenhower's response was that that was unthinkable. We were trying to use diplomatic leverage, but he wasn't about to join the Russians against our allies. Well, Khrushchev was feeling his oats, and he made a bloodcurdling threat that the Russians would go in unilaterally. Eisenhower's response was very interesting. He got Al Gruenther, the NATO commander, to hold a press conference...
...unfortunate necessity. "Anyway, nobody's safe from 'em anywhere." He does not spend his days worrying over nuclear war but he is almost certain one is coming. "You've got all those toys around. Someone's going to fool with them sooner or later. Look at Hiroshima. The Bomb was already used once. Things are building all the time. The Middle East, Central America. I listen to the radio a lot when I drive my tractor, and they were just sayin' the other day that there was--what was the name of that country? Pakistan--they were sayin' that Pakistan...
...Central America ("too far away for them"). The most probable place would be the Middle East. "But, you know, the Russians might be a little goosey about going in there because they could think, 'Those Israelis have a Masada complex.' Someone pushes the Israelis, the Israelis might just bomb the bastards...
...potential significance of Hiroshima was never lost on Americans. Even bathed in the kissing and weeping at the end of the war, people realized that the remarkable Bomb that felled an empire and brought the world to rapt attention was not going to be a gift without a price. In the Aug. 20, 1945, issue of TIME, James Agee looked ahead: "With the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age in which all thoughts and things were split--and far from controlled." Agee was anticipating an opposition between people...
...therefore went about the business of accommodating that unhappy vision, and avoiding it at the same time. Both ends were achieved in the culture, where the collective consciousness could make its fears decorative. Ever since Hiroshima the Bomb has been at the center of films, books, plays, paintings, songs, intellectual life. It has not always played the same part. In the years immediately after Hiroshima, the public seemed not to want to confront the Bomb directly, and so created a culture in which the end of the world was given a sidelong glance. Lately, we cannot seem to get enough...