Word: conundrum
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...President's dilemma spotlights a basic conundrum of the nuclear age: how to limit access to the nuclear button yet make sure it can still be pushed if something suddenly happens to the President. The novel also gets to the heart of a debate over nuclear strategy: Does it make sense to target the Kremlin and other Soviet command centers? That might serve to destroy Moscow's war-fighting capability, but it could also eliminate its ability to de- escalate a crisis once the shooting begins. This strategy is known as "nuclear decapitation," and Aaron likens it to "two headless...
...explanation for the spectacular mass movement is that when the glaciers of the last Ice Age retreated from North America, the butterflies expanded their range northward to exploit new food supplies, and then began migrating to survive the winter. How the butterflies find their winter hideouts is a conundrum as well. An intriguing theory suggests that, like certain species of birds, the monarchs may respond to the earth's magnetism: the Mexican hideaways surround a large iron-ore deposit, which creates a powerful magnetic field...
Having established this mismatched foursome, Updike translates it into a quadrilateral conundrum: the young partners looking for certainty through sex with elders who expect only momentary reprieves from the knowledge of their own limitations and eventual deaths. At issue is the possibility of redemption, but the demands of bodies in the here and now keep getting...
While Western governments grapple with the conundrum of sanctions, white South Africans are grimly pursuing their own debate about the future, fully confident that their decisions will be the determining ones. As they see it, the West has become irrational about sanctions and there is little point any longer in trying to bring reason to bear. The issue, says Tertius Myburgh, editor of the Johannesburg Sunday Times, has become "cost-free election politics" in the U.S. and "Margaret Thatcher's problem, not ours" in Britain. Although it generates political heat in Washington and London, the argument is, for white South...
...Lindsay, who asked Cuomo to mediate a dispute in Forest Hills, where middle-class, mostly Jewish families were opposed to the construction of high-rise public housing for low-income, mostly black families. Many political observers saw the assignment as political suicide, but for Cuomo it was a moral conundrum come to life, a test of neighborhood values versus civil rights. What Cuomo learned was that coming up with a simple, Solomonic solution (he proposed halving the size of the project) was a great deal easier than getting both sides to accept it. The resolution he engineered...