Word: grasping
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...Global defense expenditures have grown so large that it is difficult to grasp their full dimensions. The overall total is now in excess of $400 billion a year." The nearly $30 billion spent annually on arms research and development is more than "is spent on the problems of energy, health, education and food combined." Does the money buy greater security? McNamara asked. "No. At these exaggerated levels, only greater risk, greater danger, and greater delay in getting on with life's real purposes...
...SALT confronts a journalist with two challenges," says Talbott: "Understanding the complex, secrecy-shrouded subject and writing about it so that readers can grasp it." Talbott undertook the first challenge armed with the discipline of a Rhodes scholar at Oxford (B. Litt., 1971). "I put myself through a crash course in the exotic hardware, the numerology offeree levels and the foreign language of arms-control acronyms," he explains. As a student of Russian literature, the translator and editor of two volumes of Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs (1970 and 1974) and an observer of statecraft, Talbott knew three essential SALT...
...fairness, Jimmy Carter has had an intellectual grasp of the energy problem since the day he walked into the Oval Office. He rightly declared the moral equivalent of war early in his term to cope with the impending crisis. He got little help from any other segment of American society. And transferring his statistical conclusions into leadership in such a hostile environment has been and remains an immense problem. Having formulated the energy plan and declared it publicly, he turned to other things. Energy slipped down his list...
...history: Who conceded what to whom in exchange for what in the course of the negotiations? Attention has already begun to focus on the confused but climactic phase of SALT II, from the beginning of the Carter presidency until last week's announcement. Believing that one way to grasp SALT is to understand its evolution, TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott has spent much of the past year reconstructing the Administration's conduct of SALT, based on exclusive interviews with key officials. His report...
Nowadays the very vocabulary of public discourse can be bewildering. Even to be half informed, the American-on-the-street must grasp terms like deoxyribonucleic acid, fantastic prospects like genetic engineering, and bizarre phenomena like nuclear meltdown. The technical face of things has driven some people into a bored sort of cop-out-"science anxiety," it is called by Physics Professor Jeffry Mallow of Loyola University in Chicago. The predicament has made most Americans hostage to the superior knowledge of the expert: the scientist, the technician, the engineer, the specialist...