Word: nuclear
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Learning to Limit. The U.S. involvement in South Viet Nam and Russia's handling of Czechoslovakia are, of course, totally different situations. Both conflicts, though, serve to show the limits of big-power action. The U.S. and Russia must move with caution for fear of touching off nuclear conflict, and pay some attention to the opinions of their allies. Both superpowers must come to accept some changes that they do not like. The Russians may eventually learn the limits not only of military intervention, of which they have always been rather chary, but of political subversion as well...
...NUCLEAR PHYSICS...
...nuclear age dawned in the wrong place, at the wrong time. In 1938, outside Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, Nazis paraded in the streets. Inside, German Chemist Otto Hahn patiently probed the secrets of the atom. He repeated an experiment that had been tried by half a dozen researchers, including Enrico Fermi in Rome and Irene Joliot-Curie in Paris...
Hahn's innate caution stopped him from making so bold a claim in public. "As nuclear chemists," Hahn and his young collaborator, Fritz Strassmann, wrote later, "we cannot bring ourselves to take this step, so contradictory to all the experience of nuclear physics." But Hahn's former coworker, Physicist Lise Meitner, had no such hesitation. Hearing of the experiment in exile in Sweden, she not only proclaimed that Hahn and Strassmann had achieved nuclear fission, but also calculated that each atom of uranium had released 20 million times as much energy as a comparable amount...
...sorties. Most of their bombs are aimed south of the DMZ, where few if any antiaircraft missiles exist to threaten the lumbering, relatively slow-moving attackers. Some 80 of the Strategic Air Command's older D and E models of the B-52, originally designed to haul nuclear weapons, have been converted for Viet Nam duty. They normally carry up to 84 conventional "iron" bombs of 500 lbs. each tucked inside their bomb bays and another 24 of 750 lbs. each slung under their swept-back wings...