Word: polarizing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Arctic Revolution. The Hans Hedtoft, a diesel-powered motorship, went down the ways of Denmark's Frederikshavn shipyard last August, small but sturdy and trim. The 2,857-ton freighter had been specially designed for the Danish government to withstand the pounding seas and polar ice of the wildest stretch of the North Atlantic Ocean, off the barren shores of Greenland. She had a double steel bottom, an armored bow and stern, and was divided into seven watertight compartments; she carried the most modern instrumentation, from radar to gyro, from Decca Navigator to radio-equipped life rafts. Her veteran...
...swirl-dimpled, symbol-specked Weather Bureau maps, the storm gathered in classic pattern: polar air and Gulf of Mexico winds butted along a line that curled like an overturned roller coaster; winds overhead fluxed cold and warm. Translated into ground-level consequences last week, the winter's most severe storm heaved snow, sleet, gales, tornadoes and floods over most of the U.S. west to the Rockies, by week's end was responsible for more than 100 deaths...
...which the sonar-watching, fathometer-reading, Coke-drinking crew of the Nautilus defied the elements. In Nautilus 90 North (the message Nautilus radioed to indicate it had reached the North Pole), the supersub's skipper, Commander William R. (for Robert) Anderson, adds little to the specifics of the polar victory. But in footnote-to-history fashion, he captures something of the human effort behind the excellence, the personalities behind the perfection...
...Roulette. Anderson and the crew of the Nautilus began to rate their jobs in the summer of '57 when, in effect, they painstakingly eliminated in advance some of the hazards that might have tragically marred "Operation Sunshine" the following year. They cruised some 1,400 miles under the polar ice but were trapped more than once in sandwich-close quarters between the massive roof of ice (which on the 1957 trip extended as much as 100 ft. below the surface) and the shallow ocean floor. Once, Anderson nosed his sub to the seemingly ice-free surface but jarred against...
...honors heaped upon the Nautilus and her commander, at least one was unparalleled: the first Presidential Unit Citation ever awarded in peacetime. Of highly personal pleasure to Commander Anderson was a private ceremony in which he presented a piece of polar ice, brought back in the Nautilus' freezer, to his old boss, Rickover. The admiral's gaunt face creased into childlike smiles of delight as he examined the memento ("that piece of ice meant more to him than all the rank . . . and fame that have been showered upon him"). In its way, it was a not unfitting symbolic...