Word: deserts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Inside Operation Desert Storm, the military juggernaut that freed Kuwait in 1991, was a small, secret operation all its own: an effort to kill Saddam Hussein. Of the 40,000 U.S. air attacks during the Gulf War, about 40 were aimed at the Iraqi leader's headquarters, residences, command bunkers and buildings he was expected to visit. Pentagon lawyers had ruled that Saddam was a legal target because he was considered a wartime military commander. But in the end it didn't matter. Saddam and his entire family came through without a scratch...
This time, if and when Operation Desert Thunder is launched against Iraq, the Pentagon says it doesn't plan to target Saddam. The operation's bombing campaign, scheduled to go on for about a week, would drop most of its bombs and cruise missiles on four sets of targets: first, Iraq's air-defense network and the command centers that wire it together; second, the buildings and bunkers that allied intelligence has linked with the production of biological and chemical weapons; third, support facilities for poison-gas production, including some of the "presidential palaces" and the Republican Guard units that...
...sensitive information on its deployments to the gulf, hoping the show of force will scare Saddam into backing down. The CIA director, George Tenet, briefs Clinton daily on how the Iraqi dictator is hiding military equipment to escape damage from bombardment. This week, following closely in George Bush's Desert Storm footsteps, Clinton travels to the Pentagon for a final review of the targets...
...span of a week U.S. and British forces will be able to carry out about 1,000 air attacks--only a small percentage of the number launched during Desert Storm, and affecting a fraction of the potential targets available. But the U.S. is sure that its weapons and intelligence are much better this time. Pentagon sources tell TIME that U.S. warplanes patrolling the southern no-fly zone over the past three months have been practicing bombing runs on targets that top brass figured they might someday have to attack...
Corals are not the only recorders of climate history. Jay Noller, for example, a geomorphologist from Vanderbilt University, has been studying ancient sediments from Peru's northern desert, which is among the dryest spots on earth--except during El Nino years. Then and only then, torrential rains from a succession of storms compact surface dust into a layer of fine, red soil. From the age of the soils he has examined so far, Noller concludes that the El Nino cycle has been operating for at least 2 million years, and probably much longer...