Word: scientistic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Tumerman, a Soviet scientist who later emigrated to Israel, set off for home after visiting his brother. As he drove through a deserted region in the southern Ural Mountains, he passed a road sign warning motorists not to stop for the next 20 miles and to proceed as fast as possible. A little farther on he saw why. "To the right and to the left, as far as the eye could see," he later wrote, "there was empty land. The land was dead: no villages, no towns, only chimneys of destroyed homes, no cultivated fields or pastures, no herds...
What the horrified scientist had come upon seemed to be the result of an event that had occurred several years before--perhaps the worst nuclear accident in history up to that time. Sometime in the winter of 1957-58, it became apparent that the area around the city of Kyshtym, believed to be a center of Soviet plutonium production, was contaminated by large amounts of radiation. Though the causes of the disaster remain murky, the effects seem to have been devastating. As winds picked up and scattered the radiation debris, the poison spread across an area larger than New York...
...Gorbachev's goal of taking up the mantle of the recognized champion of a nuclear-free world has certainly been set back. Last Tuesday, when a Soviet diplomat was trying to elicit West German help with the accident cleanup while providing as little information as possible, a West German scientist finally lost his temper and shouted at him, "This is not some little game we are playing. You are now responsible for endangering life on our planet." The world will not soon forget that, nor how the Soviets reacted to Chernobyl...
...contemplates the meaning of it all. "We may be on the ground floor of the primary anxiety of the rest of history," says one character, benefiting from the hindsight of fiction. Records of the actual event contain revealing statements that defy the imagination. Said a general to the scientist who had called the century's most resonant countdown: "What a wonderful thing that you could count backward at a time like this...
Curry was the mad scientist of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, resplendent in black satin and bad manners. Here he is a figure of more majestic maleficence. Sprawling in the lubricious gloom of his lair, he looks like a huge Naugahyde goat demon who has been flayed and candied, then served sweet- and-sour at a Chinese restaurant in Middle-Earth. "I require the solace of shadows," he purrs to the benighted Lili. "Neath the skin, we are already one." And he leads her into a dance that black magically turns this virgin into Salome, fit for a satyr king...