Word: delta
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Standing on the runway on insectlike legs, the plane had a hunched, tense look. Its nose was a sharp metal spike, and the leading edges of its delta wing curled downward a little, suggesting a cobra's hood. But even when it was standing still, it seemed to be moving, and when its engines opened wide, it snapped forward like a toy on a rubber cord and leaped into the air at a sharp angle. The plane was the new B58 Hustler, a bomber made by Convair...
...speed of the Hustler, unapproached in other large bombers, is partly due to its peculiar "conical camber" delta wing, partly to the concentrated power of its four great General Electric J79 engines (more than 15,000 lbs. thrust each). Another important factor is the "pod" that can be hung below its fuselage. Almost ideally streamlined, the pod has comparatively little drag, but it can carry a large thermonuclear bomb and fuel for the outgoing leg of a long flight. At the target, the pod can be dropped. In effect, the use of the pod eliminates empty bomb bays and fuel...
...turned steely grey with the approach of the monsoon, but in the laced paddies of North Viet Nam's Red River delta last week, the rice still stood thick and unharvested. The Communists' vaunted land-reform program had gone badly wrong. In some areas it had created such chaos that no peasant knew whose land he was to harvest, and whole villages had turned savagely on their Communist mentors and run them out of town...
...Landlord Mentality." The prestige of each Communist cadre was made dependent on the number of landlords sent to the gallows. But in the overpopulated delta, the richest landowners had no more than two or three acres and a couple of water buffaloes. Even one-acre landlords became hard to find, and the cadres coined a new phrase-"landlord mentality." A peasant married to a girl whose ancestors had owned a dozen cows had landlord mentality. In a final purge last fall, even this stratagem was exhausted, and old cadres resorted to accusing new cadres of "landlordism." Jails became filled with...
...since slave days have hated the Moslems. Zik himself nurtures a private plan to carve some non-Yoruba areas out of his chief rival's Western territories, while his opponents want to set up a new state among the non-Ibos in Zik's own Niger River delta...