Word: commandeer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...secure vault in the U.S. Army's super-secret Intelligence and Security Command in northern Virginia, Colonel Mike Tanksley sketches the barest outlines of the new Armageddons. These are only "What ifs?" he insists, so there cannot really be details. Yet his war scenario resounds with almost biblical force. The next time a tyrant out of some modern Babylon (Baghdad, Tehran or Tripoli, for example) threatens an American ally (Riyadh, Cairo, Jerusalem) the U.S. doesn't immediately send legions of soldiers or fleets of warships. Instead Washington visits upon the offending tyranny a series of thoroughly modern plagues, born...
...years pundits had been proclaiming the demise of the Big Three, and they will no doubt do so again. While it is true that cable has eroded broadcast viewership--ABC, NBC and CBS together command a market share of only 57% as compared with 61% just last year and 91% in the late 1970s--the networks still reach 98% of American homes. Even in the face of declining audiences, the broadcast networks are looking at their best year ever in terms of advertising, with an expected $5 billion in revenues for the 1995-96 season. For a movie studio looking...
There's much to like in Ursula Hegi's forcefully written novel (Simon & Schuster; 235 pages; $22) of child abuse and parental desertion. The author's strengths -- an unfailing immediacy of language and real, vivid scenes that command attention -- are all on display. But the book's structure, saysTIME's John Skow, "might have been designed by a committee to illustrate how bitter, unresolved childhood memories can be coped with." What we're left with is a plot straight out of a bad soap opera, and even a writer as gifted as Hegi can't dress it up as anything...
...Marianas some 1,500 miles south of Japan, U.S. forces had constructed the largest airport in the world, including four parallel, 8,500-ft.-long runways designed for B-29 Superfortresses. Several of the incendiary-bomb raids on Japanese cities staged by Major General Curtis LeMay's XXI Bomber Command began and ended in the Marianas. Members of the 509th unit started arriving at Tinian in June. On July 26, components of Little Boy, the uranium-based bomb that was scheduled to be dropped first, reached Tinian aboard the U.S. warship Indianapolis...
...seen and then heard flying some 30,000 ft. over Hiroshima. No alarms sounded in time. The radio announcer on duty had received word that three enemy planes had been sighted, but he had momentarily paused to check his notes instead of grabbing the microphone at once. "Military command announces three enemy planes ..." He never finished. Outside, a teacher supervising a team of schoolgirl laborers said, "Oh, there's a B!" They looked up and saw the eye of death...