Word: fuses
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...Moslems have been strictly law-abiding-a fact that worries some cops more than minor outbreaks of violence. "It's getting worse every day," says a Los Angeles police official, "and I only wish I knew what it's going to take to light the fuse." The Moslems themselves talk of 1970 as their DDay, expansively predict that before that time the big white nations will have eliminated each other with atomic warfare and Black Africa will stand unchallenged. Says Chicago Urban League's Negro Director Edwin C. Berry: "A guy like this Moslem leader makes...
...rusty nose-bolts on the bombs begin to turn. There are the sweat-beaded pauses when the demolition man draws the cables taut as delicately as if he were landing a poorly hooked fish. There is the drawn-out moment when a seemingly defused bomb reveals a second fuse and blows a man to bits. And through it all, Director Aldrich deploys his camera like a melancholy tourist over the desolate Berlin ruins. As drama, Ten Seconds is something of a dud; as melodrama, it ticks like an activated blockbuster...
Finding the bomb is the least of it. Most German bombs had an electric fuse charged by current flowing through a long telescopic arm at the moment of release. When the bomb hit the ground, the shock worked a "trembler switch" that touched off the bomb's main charge. After 14 years, these electric fuses are dead, but what about the clockwork fuses used to back them up? Answer: a magnetic clock-stopper to freeze the mechanism...
...Germans were also very nasty about anti-handling booby traps. One type of fuse was supersensitized after the bomb hit the ground, with a switch so delicate that it could operate if the bomb shell was tapped with a pencil. Hartley's men learned to outwit some mechanisms by injecting a quick-setting plastic. If the bomb is too difficult to defuse, they drill holes in its casing and melt out the explosive with live steam...
...respectively, the play and the dream-scene within it, which together justify the subtitle of Man and Superman, "a Comedy and a Philosophy." (This is not to say, of course, that the main play lacks philosophy or the interlude lacks comedy. Shaw's peculiar gift is his ability to fuse...