Word: slow
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...duty: one as Commanding General of the Eastern Defense Command, the other as Commanding General of the Fourth Army at Fort Sam Houston and the Eighth Service Command at Dallas. Actually, he had spent most of his time touring and speaking on Army promotion projects. Now he could slow down...
Eaton took this line: "Americans are such good people that they are slow to recognize wickedness. . . ." Russia is a "ruthless and brutal nation," full of "atheism and immorality," its inhabitants, "ranging from Mongol beggars to stuffed commissars," mostly unhappy. In a flash of etymological insight he concluded: "Neither the Russians nor their tyrants understand the meaning of democracy. They are Slavs, which means captives or slaves...
Delegates were far more likely to forget their conference disputes than the fantastic Babylon-in-Brazil in which their sessions had been held. The Swiss-styled Quitandinha Hotel sits in a fogbound mountain valley with little to see but man-made pools, lawns, terraces and a horse ring. Syrup-slow dining-room service had queered routine entertaining. Bar prices ($2.45 for a Scotch) dried up most sociable drinking. Griped Ecuador's Foreign Minister José Trujillo, worried about his bills after a revolution at home: "It costs $64 a day to live; it costs extra to laugh." Some delegates...
Essentially, the tame bomb is a "pile" like the original uranium pile at the University of Chicago. But uranium needs slow-moving neutrons to make its atoms split. Thus, a uranium pile is made up of small rods of uranium embedded in a large mass of graphite. Plutonium is different: its atoms can be split by fast neutrons. So a pile made of plutonium needs no graphite or other "moderator." The "Nagasaki model" atom bomb is a plutonium pile that reacts so quickly that it blows itself (and the neighborhood) to bits in millionths of a second...
...bomb-tamers of Los Alamos had a ticklish assignment: to make their bomb explode, but gently, in slow motion. How they solved the problem has not been fully explained. Uranium piles are kept from reacting too fast by inserting cadmium rods into the graphite. The rods absorb neutrons and check the action. The more cadmium, the slower the pile percolates. Some similar method may be controlling the tame plutonium...