Word: shield
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Wrapped around the flattened underside of the earth is a massive, high-domed shield of rock and ice. This is the Antarctic Continent, a frozen and almost lifeless wasteland studded with glistening mountains that stand like icy tombstones over a cosmos-sized graveyard. In its skies, angry clouds drift over seas of corrugated sastrugi and sparkling glacial spillways. To the explorer this continent of 5,000,000 square miles-three-fourths as big as the U.S. and Canada combined-is a geologic throwback to the Ice Age. It is the world's most hostile environment of earth...
...they often make up in wit. To the surprise of Manhattan critics, they also follow the rules of good sculpture. A case in point is Stankiewicz's The Warrior, which is armored with a hatmaker's discarded boiler, has a butane-bottle head and a boiler-plate shield. The Warrior's spindly steel rod legs, girded with buggy wheels, and its limp crest of dangling BX cable give it'away. Says Stankiewicz: "It's most menacing from the front, but it's futile in spite of its posture...
...told the council frankly that it could no longer maintain its defense expenditures, which are currently running at $4.2 billion a year or 9% of the total national product. France admitted that there was no prospect of bringing back the four divisions it pulled out of NATO's shield for service in North Africa...
...comedown was considerable from the high hopes of Lisbon in 1952, when the NATO council set a goal of 65 "ready" divisions. In 1954 NATO cut back its hopes, adopted a "new look" strategy based on the use of tactical atomic weapons behind a thin "plateglass" shield of infantry, and put the new target at 30 divisions. The plate glass was getting thinner all the time. Last week NATO could field only 15 "shield" divisions, of which five were U.S., four British, to defend the line from the Alps to the Baltic...
Dulles had some cause for confidence. Soviet brutality in Hungary had once again impressed upon the mind of Western Europe the need for NATO as a defense shield. On hand with Dulles in Paris were Defense Secretary Charles Wilson and Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, both determined that NATO should not let down its guard. And in the face of the Soviet threat, other NATO members were no longer so anxious to cut costs by slashing NATO manpower...