Word: metallics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...January of 1978, the Soviet spy satellite Cosmos 954 dropped out of orbit and fell to earth. It did not completely disintegrate in the atmosphere. Instead, debris from the satellite fell across almost 40,000 square miles of northwest Canada. Metal from the sky is frightening enough, but this metal was radioactive...
...residents of Lockerbie is likely ever to forget the horrors that befell the Scottish village during Christmas week of 1988. At dinnertime last Wednesday, on the first night of winter, a rain of fire and metal suddenly fell on Lockerbie, destroying houses and automobiles and scattering debris as far as 80 miles away. Some called it a "great ball of flame" and likened it to a fire storm or a mighty clap of thunder, while others wondered if it was the result of an accident at a nearby nuclear plant...
Scarcely a country on earth has been spared the scourge. From the festering industrial landfills of Bonn to the waste-choked sewage drains of Calcutta, the trashing goes on. A poisonous chemical soup, the product of coal mines and metal smelters, roils Polish waters in the Bay of Gdansk. Hong Kong, with 5.7 million people and 49,000 factories within its 400 sq. mi., dumps 1,000 tons of plastic a day -- triple the amount thrown away in London. Stinking garbage and human excrement despoils Thailand's majestic River of Kings. Man's effluent is more than an assault...
...remembered about Gorbachev's Dec. 7, 1988, speech is not just his specific proposals -- many of them had been made before -- but also the way they fit together in a world forum to transcend the ideological dogmas that have driven Soviet foreign policy for 70 years. With his metal- rimmed glasses glinting in the lights of the General Assembly's green marble dais, Gorbachev praised the "tremendous impetus to mankind's progress" that came from the French and Russian revolutions. "But," he added -- and a listener should always lean forward when Gorbachev begins a sentence with that conjunction -- "today...
...blame for last week's shocking toll on the shoddy construction of the buildings in Armenia's cities and towns. According to Brian Tucker, acting state geologist of California who has visited Armenia, many buildings in the region are made of 8-in.-thick concrete slabs held together by metal hooks and mortar. Poorer Armenians, he says, tend to live in "very fragile, very deadly houses" made of unreinforced mud and rock. Yet geologists have long known that the region affected by the quake is interlaced with small faults in the earth's crust and has been shaken by dozens...