Word: dangerous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That hint of danger had not dissuaded the nine Americans, most of them normally sedentary landlubbers, from boarding the sturdy 48-ft. fishing trawler Gabriella in Kingston, Jamaica, and heading into the windswept Caribbean on a stomach-churning 124-mile, 15-hour voyage to U.S.-owned Navassa Island, 30 miles west of Haiti. Unaccountably cheerful through the stormy night, the five-man Jamaican crew and the boat's Kingston owner, Gilbert Thompson ("I couldn't trust the responsibility of this trip to just the crew"), kept the craft on course toward its tiny target: a flat-topped limestone...
...worthy as U.S. mediation might seem, the risks are enormous. There is a danger of lasting damage to the uniquely intimate U.S. relationship with Britain, Washington's closest ally. Though Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government expressed understanding of the U.S. desire to maintain neutrality while trying to mediate the conflict, unofficial voices were asking: Where are the Americans, now that we need them? Warned the Economist, a prestigious and firmly pro-American British weekly: "Have-it-both-ways irresolution on the part of the United States will lose British popular support for America's nuclear policies...
...another matter. Princeton Psychologist George Miller, for one, has doubts that "a few years of thinking like a computer can change patterns of irrational thought that have persisted throughout recorded history." Other social critics ask if clear thinking is enough-if, in fact, there might not be a danger in raising a generation to believe that it has the analytical tools to contemplate any problem. Says M.I.T. Computer Science Professor Joseph Weizenbaum: "There's a whole world of real problems...
...what, in turn, their capabilities show about our own. In other words, a computer may not display the whole of human intelligence, but that portion it can display could do a lot more good for man's self-confidence than continuing reassurances that he is in no immediate danger of death by robot...
...movement." The heart of Kinsley's argument is that Schell too readily subordinates "liberty," "national sovereignty" and other values to "survival," because the only possible outcomes he sees to nuclear confrontation are annihilation or peace at any price. Contends Kinsley: "To Schell, apparently, all considerations apart from the danger of nuclear war are mere distractions...