Word: commandant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...REASON FOR THE RUSSIANS' fear stems from little appreciated facts recently made clear in two New Yorker articles dealing with nuclear strategy. The articles discussed American and Russian war-fighting plans, and concluded that given the vulnerability of command and control systems to preemptive nuclear attack both sides have put reliance on a hair-trigger strategy...
...might be doing us all a favor should one day Russia and the United States find themselves deep in crisis. It's not pleasant to think that force stand on a hair-trigger, but in an age of precision technology, when one side can wipe out the other's command systems in a matter of minutes, that's just reality. Anything that minutes this reality less painful on the "day of reckoning" should be welcomed
...voice-recognition systems in most of these devices can be compared to a human searching through a key ring for duplicate pairs of keys; by aligning two keys at a time, he can quickly locate any pairs that have identical sawtooth patterns. In the electronic equivalent, a spoken command is transformed into a varying electrical current that can be represented by a wave with a characteristic set of peaks and troughs. This wave form (see diagram) is converted into a template, a pattern of zeros and ones that the computer can digest and store. By prerecording a number...
...window of vulnerability" in U.S. missile power before it took office in 1981, contends that the Minuteman silos can be "hardened" with additional concrete. But whether they would be strong enough even then is doubtful. In an attempt to defuse the issue, Air Force General Bennie Davis, commander of the Strategic Air Command, vainly sought to convince a congressional subcommittee three weeks ago that the "window" expression was shorthand not for silo exposure but for overall strategic inferiority...
...poetry, ballet and 'just dancing,' " noted the composer in his log the year before it opened. In Candide (1956), he had attempted such a synthesis, but that show was crippled by a bitter book that was vulgarized in its later revisions. With West Side Story, however, Bernstein's command of popular idioms, his soaring lyric gifts and technical skills got free rein in a show as powerful as a street rumble. West Side Story ran for 734 performances, became a 1961 film that won ten Academy Awards and was revived onstage several times...