Word: sheer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...contributions to allied fighting strength are sufficiently meager-it is two divisions behind its commitments in Germany, it withholds its Mediterranean fleet from NATO, keeps most of its metropolitan territory out of the air warning system, and even prohibits foreign nuclear weapons on French soil. Still, sheer geography gives France a veto on NATO planning. Could France be ignored in the tariff discussions of the 40-odd members of GATT, or in OECD, the European economic coordinating group that grew out of the Marshall Plan? Hardly, since the economies of all Western European nations are intertwined with France...
Harvard Psychologist Burrhus F. Skinner has taught pigeons to play pingpong, invented teaching machines for people. But for sheer practicality, nothing he has yet devised beats his "Skinner baby box"-a household incubator for human chicks...
...Gaulle's European design is introverted, smaller, and dependent more on audacity and cleverness than on sheer power. In effect, it represents another of the historic efforts to create a unified Europe under French leadership-an ambition that was pursued in the past by Charlemagne, Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte and Napoleon III. To De Gaulle, Europe's rivers and mountains are not barriers, but the oceans are. Since 1940 he has dreamed of persuading the "states along the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees to form a political, economic and strategic bloc; to establish this organization...
Dark and forbidding, the rocky pinnacle rises 9,750 ft. out of the Italian Dolomites, and the last 1,800 ft. of its north wall is as sheer and smooth as a Manhattan skyscraper. An Italian team first scaled Cima Grande di Lavaredo's north wall in 1933. and the rock is stitched with hundreds of pitons, or spikes, left behind by alpinists following the winding "staircase" trail to the summit. But not until this month did anyone tackle Cima Grande's north wall by the "elevator route"-straight up. Even in summer, that route was so perilous...
...fitter named Rainer Kauschke, 24, and a tough, muscular carpenter named Gerd Uner, 22. Taking unpaid leaves from their jobs, the three each chipped in $1,000 for food and medical supplies, down-lined clothes, lightweight nylon ropes and 1,000 special pitons, designed by Kauschke. On the sheer slate and limestone of the "elevator," Siegert knew they would find few natural handholds; only the ropes and pitons would keep the three human flies from plunging to their deaths...