Word: bombs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Herr, who spent a year in Viet Nam covering the war for Esquire, writes prose that resembles some weapon the Pentagon developed especially for Viet Nam-hallucinatory, menacing, full of anxiety, death and a stunning, offhanded sort of accuracy. Herr is a writer with the talent of a smart bomb. Like James Webb in his fairly straightforward 1978 novel Fields of Fire, Herr is able to locate the thing inside the soldiers, and himself, that enjoys the appalling charm of war. Writes Herr: "But somewhere all the mythic tricks intersected, from the lowest John Wayne wet dream to the most...
...Viet Nam vets are latent psychos or, like Jon Voight in Coming Home, sensitive and guilt-ridden. These are comic-book caricatures." Charles Figley, a Purdue University psychologist who wrote a study of his fellow Viet Nam veterans, agrees: "All the myths about the guy being a walking time bomb are just total and utter fantasy. Most have readjusted remarkably well, considering the circumstances...
...years, the U.S. government played the same secrecy game with the atomic bomb, ostensibly protecting America's security by keeping the A-bomb "secret" under wraps. Then three undergraduates (one of them a Harvard student who managed only a B- in Physics 55) independently designed workable A-bombs without access to classified information, exploding the government's logic of using information control to contain the spread of nuclear weapons. Unphased, the government simply classified the student's designs...
...attempts to control public information only obscure the real point: because we simply cannot control the knowledge of how to make a nuclear bomb, atomic or hydrogen--we must control the fissionable materials needed to do so. If we don't want to live in "a nuclear armed crowd" (as one commentator has put it), we will have to stop blithely spreading uranium and plutonium around the globe under the guise of the "peaceful atom...
...articles in the popular press--but nuclear power reactors and their support facilities--that can really give Idi Amin a Bomb, something he could probably use right about...