Word: launch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Before they launched their ground attack, allied commanders were concerned that Iraqi artillery might inundate their troops with poison gas and nerve agents. In fact, not a single chemical weapon was fired, even though U.S. Marines found stocks of poison-gas shells in frontline positions. General Schwarzkopf said he did not know why the Iraqis failed to use them, but he speculated that their artillery -- the main delivery system for chemical shells -- was too badly damaged to launch a concerted attack. It is also possible that the chemicals themselves were no longer potent after being stored for months...
...George Bush prepared to launch a ground war, Mikhail Gorbachev made one last attempt to broker peace between Iraq and the allies. Once again he dispatched his personal adviser, Yevgeni Primakov, to Baghdad, and then agreed to see Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in Moscow. The Kremlin desperately tried to persuade Saddam that he must comply with the U.N. Security Council resolutions or face the terrible consequences of a ground battle. Here is Primakov's account of those last, tense days...
After hearing rebukes that Soviet policy had given the "green light" to the "U.N. war against Iraq" and declarations about Iraq's "unshakable" stand, I asked to be left alone with Saddam. Then I said to him, "The Americans are determined to launch a large-scale ground operation to crush Iraqi forces in Kuwait." Politics, I reminded him, was the art of the possible. On Gorbachev's instructions, I made a proposal: to announce the pullout of troops from Kuwait. The deadline should be the shortest possible, and the withdrawal should be total and without conditions...
Child-custody disputes are often the trigger for youngsters' unwitting lies. Suspicions can cause parents to launch what legal scholar Douglas Besharov of Washington's American Enterprise Institute calls "the atomic bomb of child- custody fights, the charge of sex abuse." In these stressful situations, children quickly discover what adults want to hear and can offer lies or distortions in order to please an anxious parent or social worker. A study conducted by the American Academy of Child Psychiatry found that in custody disputes involving charges of sex abuse, as many as 36% of the allegations were later proved...
Despite initial fears, the attackers turned out to be not Iraqi-sponsored terrorists but an older British adversary: the Irish Republican Army. The would-be assassins had parked a van 200 yds. from the Prime Minister's offices, then used a delayed-timing device to launch three mortar shells from the vehicle while they escaped. One landed in a garden at the back of Major's official residence; two more fell behind the Foreign Office. A total of three people were injured...