Word: doomsday
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...should be pointed out that man tried to stop himself from building this doomsday machinery, but he failed. And this is only a clue to the true vastness of the futility in trying to avoid the end of the world. For while perhaps Esquire's doctor is wrong and maybe the winds of the uper atmosphere will keep the earth cool and the ice caps frozen, there still remains the threat of thousands of unforescen catastrophes that we are only now becoming capable...
...dark side of progress is man's spectacular skill at devising better and better ways to kill other men. The nuclear bomb, unfortunately, is not the end of it. There is also chemical and biological warfare, known as CBW, a fount of doomsday weapons that the U.S. and Russia have been rapidly developing. Until recently, the docility of Congress toward Pentagon planning forestalled any real review of the hush-hush CBW program with its secret appropriations. Now, prompted by press reports and rumors, emboldened by the general concern over U.S. military policy, congressional investigators are demanding answers from...
Where Can We Go? Last week doomsday talk reached fever pitch. Disk jockeys were spinning a hit calypso tune called Day After Day, which asks: "Where can we go when there's no San Francisco?" A book called The Last Days of the Late, Great State of California, which gives a jolt-by-jolt preview of the disaster, was a bestseller...
Naturally, the vast majority of Californians are treating the doomsday talk as a huge, macabre joke, but the fears of the gloomy visionaries are not entirely without justification. Seismologists say that California has been long overdue for a major earthquake, although a fissure that would split the state in two along the length of the 600-mile San Andreas fault is in their opinion inconceivable. Nor, they add, can anyone predict the time, place or magnitude of the quake with absolute certitude. In fact, one of the quake dates predicted by soothsayers, April 4, passed last week without a tremor...
Kurt Vonnegut was mourning the follies of the world with laughter long before the term "black humorist" had been coined. In a series of fictional fables he confronted a remarkable range of topics: space, religion, creeping technology, how to love the unlovable, and even doomsday, which, as he gently observes, "could easily be next Wednesday." His first book, Player Piano (1952). told how a crew of smoothly programmed engineers take over America. Another, Cat's Cradle, began with a reporter trying to fix the whereabouts of important Americans at the time the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and ended...