Word: cataclysmal
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Even organizing a neighborhood, though, requires some interest on the part of the neighbors, an interest the opiate of short-term economic gain will dull. And anyway, the organizers will recognize soon enough that improving one corner of Cambridge while the country, and with it the world, heads toward cataclysm is like serving drinks aboard a 747 as it nosedives into the Pacific. When that realization dawns, survivalists won't be the only ones buying guns. Americans believe blissfully that political violence is impossible here, overlooking the wave of bombings that rocked this country in the late 1960s. Backed...
...talk Government reorganization and revenue sharing. His mind probes beyond the merely visible. If the Soviet moves in Afghanistan are unopposed, that confirms to the men in the Politburo that they can invade the soft spots of the free world with impunity. If that attitude survives these months, then cataclysm lies ahead. Carter must move on instinct, something he has avoided for three years...
...deprivation, more meat is one of their basic demands, and one of the major promises that their leaders have made to them. It symbolizes, in a way, the success or failure of the system. A slight decline in Moscow's ability to feed its people will not be a cataclysm, but it will be felt by Soviet citizens...
That is the concern of former Secretary of Defense (and more recently, of Energy) James Schlesinger. In an interview last week with TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, Schlesinger described the fall of the Shah last January and the rise of Khomeini as "a cataclysm for American foreign policy?the first serious revolution since 1917 in terms of world impact." Said Schlesinger: "It is plain that respect for the U.S. would be higher if we didn't just fumble around continuously and weren't half-apologetic about whatever we do. An image of weakness is going to elicit this kind...
...frightening a natural cataclysm as had befallen the young nation. Buildings tumbled and forests were destroyed. Giant fissures opened in the ground, accompanied by a thunderous roar and a spreading sulfurous odor. Wrote one eyewitness: "The whole land was moved and waved like waves of the sea." The usually placid Mississippi became an angry torrent of whirlpools and rapids, overflowing its banks and possibly even briefly reversing course...