Word: metallic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...from 41 m.p.h. to 1,870 m.p.h., depending on the drop altitude and method of release. Some are merely shoved out of airplanes or hovering helicopters; others are dive-bombed or rocketed to boost their velocities. The best penetrators, Sandia has found, are pencil-shaped missiles of heavy metal that are at least 8 to 10 times longer than their diameters. Some have plunged more than 200 ft. into the earth...
With Schweitzer's full approval, the central bankers of the U.S. and six other leading industrial nations revised a key part of the world's monetary rules. They agreed to stop buying and selling gold, and to use their remaining store of the precious metal only to settle debts between nations. Thus out of their hastily called weekend meeting was born a two-tier pricing system for gold. For central-bank exchanges of gold and dollars, the familiar $35-per-oz. price continues. For speculators, hoarders and industrial users, the price was freed to find its own level...
...currency by weight of gold, and guaranteed to convert paper money to bullion on demand. Honoring that commitment forced nations into ruthless de flations, panics, recessions. Under today's gold-exchange standard, which was evolved in the '20s to economize on the need for the metal, central banks hold some reserves in foreign currencies convertible to gold (such as the dollar). -Tinkering daily with the price of gold during the months before that, F.D.R. liked to decide on a figure in a huddle with Acting Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Financial Adviser George F. Warren and Reconstruction Finance Boss...
...after they ran into-but failed to recognize-their balance of payments problems. Founded on plunder, Rome as an empire lacked the manufacturing, agriculture and commerce to pay for its costly imports. Trajan added copper to the once 99%-pure-silver denarius, and later the coin became wholly base metal. A century before Alaric sacked the Eternal City in A.D. 410, Rome had lost not only its purchasing power but also the wherewithal to resist barbarians at its borders...
...which makes loans to underdeveloped countries. Bretton Woods' key decision was to stick with gold as the primary international monetary asset. In vain, Britain's John Maynard Keynes argued for creation of a new international money to sup plant gold. He warned that reliance on "the barbarous metal" would ultimately lead to a drying up of reserves and re strictions on trade and capital flow. The U.S. (then holding some 57% of the world's monetary gold) prevailed with its view that creation of the IMF - a dar ing innovation for its day - would solve the problem...