Word: kilo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Iran--operating more than 100 diesel-electric subs. Vessels of this type are quiet underwater, but their need to recharge their batteries forces them to surface every day or so, when they become sitting ducks. Nonetheless, Navy planners repeatedly cite the possibility that Iran's three Russian-made Kilo subs could bottle up the mouth of the Persian Gulf in a time of crisis, picking off thin-skinned oil tankers like marksmen at a state fair. But few believe that even this scary scenario would be much more than a 48-hour headache for the Pentagon...
Hochschild's curiosity was indeed tremendous--King Leopold's Ghost is an extraordinarily dense work filled with Steamboat schedules, diary entries, calculations of the price of harvesting rubber from 1897 to 1904 in exact francs per kilo, and fantastical newspaper headlines from various countries. Yet Hochschild's carefully controlled pen never allows the data to dominate the story; he integrates the information into a fluid narrative style. This story is far from a series of dry laundry lists. Hochschild begins each chapter with a vivid character portrait that provides an accessible segue into the heart of the story...
...visitor in the streets feels no tangible fear or frenzy, no outward anxiety that attack is imminent. Baghdad's new poor are worrying as always about their daily bread. A lucky man might earn 4,000 dinars a month, the price of a kilo of meat. Families get by on soup and rice, for lunch and dinner. Women in the streets peddle rings and bracelets to help pay rent; children beg everywhere, offering a few pathetic sticks of incense or just a sad look on their haggard faces. Middle-class families long ago sold off their television sets, rugs...
...Seven kilo...
...found on the Internet, a beer fermenter, a culture and a gas mask, with a total investment of about $10,000. "If you buy commercial equipment," he says, "and put it in a very small room, you can be producing kilogram quantities of anthrax within a month." And each kilo "has millions and millions of potential deaths in it." A study by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment estimated that 100 kilos of anthrax spread by a crop duster over Washington could cause 2 million deaths...