Word: dome
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...this year the British government reported that from April 2003 to April 2004, nuclear-plant security was compromised more than 40 times; guards failed to answer an intruder alarm during a burglary, for instance. In 2003 Greenpeace volunteers breached the control building of a plant and scaled the reactor dome. Before 9/11, most plant guards were unarmed, but in April the government established the Civil Nuclear Constabulary to supply armed guards. So far, however, it consists of only 650 guards and staff, who are responsible for 43 facilities nationwide...
This is entirely appropriate, for the movie's subject is superbrainy young people, non-nerd division. They have been recruited to a double-dome school at the M.I.T.-Caltech level by slick Professor Jerome Hathaway (William Atherton), who has an explain-it-all science show on TV and a Government contract to build a particularly unsavory laser-powered weapon. His students do all the hard work, while he glides, snakelike, through the corridors of power. Among his drones are Mitch (Gabe Jarret), an innocent 15-year-old prodigy; Kent (Robert Prescott), who is teacher's pet, half toady, half Gestapo...
...dome itself is of the geodesic variety, an open latticework of metal bars on which the crowd clambers and clings, forming a subhuman wall of ecstatically writhing bodies and bloodlusting faces. Scattered about the structure are various objects useful in carnage (a chain saw, a huge mallet, a viciously shaped sword of superhuman dimensions). The gladiators are placed in slings that are in turn attached to industrial-strength rubber bands. Boiing! They bounce off the walls and fly at each other with comic, alarming force. Piing! They are catapulted into the dome's upper reaches, grabbing frantically for whatever weapon...
...dome nor the Peace Park nor the monuments--and there are dozens of monuments to victims throughout the city--give any real feeling of the devastation of Aug. 6, 1945. Even the film that is shown visitors to the Peace Museum displays less sadness and horror than one would expect, in spite of the pictures of scorched children and hairless women lying listless in hospital beds. Far more affecting is a three-to-five-minute 16-mm movie in Kawamoto's possession that shows Hiroshima in 1936: men who still dressed in kimono; elegant women scooting rapidly through the streets...
...area's most recognizable structure is what is now called the Atomic Bomb Dome, originally Hiroshima Prefecture's Industrial Promotion Hall, a sort of chamber of commerce building and exhibition hall in 1945. The remains stand just outside the point of the park, across the Aioi Bridge. This shell is Hiroshima's Eiffel Tower, its Statue of Liberty. Where the dome rose, only the supporting beams remain, a giant hairnet capping four floors of vacant gray walls, much of their outer skin peeled away, exposing patches of brick. The interior floors are also gone, making the entire structure an accidental...