Word: shapely
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Squash Court Pile. Production of plutonium was probably no more important, but vastly more dramatic. On a squash court under the stands of University of Chicago's football field, a strange apparatus took form. It was an oblate spheroid (doorknob shape), built up of graphite bricks with lumps of uranium or uranium oxide imbedded in their corners. This was the world's first chain reaction "pile"-a uranium "lattice" and a graphite "moderator." If it worked according to Dr. Fermi's theories, it would produce the first chain reaction ever set up on earth...
...Challenge. But the atomic bomb was something more than an instrument to shape 1945's history. It represented a brutal challenge to the world to keep the peace. The scientists had created, and had successfully applied, a weapon which might wipe out with a few strokes any nation's power to resist an enemy...
...whether it is stiff or not is a matter of opinion, but it certainly isn't white and never was. I put in three hard years helping to quarry and shape the marble and I know it's pink and always will be pink...
With that war's unprecedented mobilization of national resources to offset blockade, governments learned new economic tricks and developed new appetites for control "in the national interest." Under the pinch of depression in the 1930s. governments manipulated their currencies to shape foreign trade. Counter-manipulation led to government control of imports & exports, and then to still more currency manipulation...
Kruger led his handful of men against thousands of British regulars for six months, then made a desperate trip to Europe in search of aid. He died in Switzerland in 1904, and it was left to mere youths such as Smuts, Botha and Hertzog to build and shape today's Anglo-Boer Dominion of South Africa...