Word: maginot
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Hitler decided to rethink the whole strategy. The French defense was based on the "Maginot Line," a chain of fortifications that stretched 200 miles along the frontier from Switzerland north as far as Luxembourg. Built at a cost of $200 million (a substantial sum at a time when a workman earned about $3 a day), the Maginot Line was considered invulnerable; its strongest outposts bristled with antitank guns, machine guns and barbed wire, and boasted concrete walls 10 ft. thick as well as supply depots 100 ft. underground. To the north of the Ardennes Forest, which was only lightly fortified...
...characters ranging from "Lucky" Luciano to Norman Mailer. Among the more mean-spirited is his sketch of Frank Lloyd Wright, drowsy at 90, commissioned to plan a country house and proposing something vast, costly and impractical, including a suspended swimming pool requiring "heavy construction on the order of the Maginot Line...
...passions for change, is by most accounts a good thing. A constitution is supposed to be a tightly knit plan of government, not an open statute book. Bulk can even be an inverse indication of its power: the 181 articles in the constitution of the Weimar Republic were the Maginot Line of German democracy. "It's dangerous to amend the Constitution too much," says Columbia University Law Professor Vincent Blasi. "It won't have the look of fundamental...
...Economic Community can resist some American economic pressures, such as our recent demands for tariff reductions and coordination of fiscal and monetary policies, but they remain at the beck and call of U.S. military planners. U.S. pressure to "share" SDI technology has left many European leaders, who remember the Maginot Line, frustrated at the extravagence and rigidity of American planners. At the same time, Reagan's wild unilateralism at the Reykjavik summit has raised fears that defense plans for Europe are too little dependent on European consent--and too much on American caprice...
...missiles launched from close range ((with "depressed," sub-ballistic trajectories)). Any ABM system, including SDI, can be effectively overcome by simply increasing the number of decoys and operational warheads, by jamming and by various methods of deception. All this as well as other considerations makes SDI a kind of "Maginot line in space" -- expensive and ineffective. Opponents of SDI maintain that even though it would be ineffective as a defensive weapon, it could create a shield behind which a first strike would be launched, since it might be effective in repelling a weakened retaliatory strike...