Word: space
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some experts fear that the increasing U.S. reliance on reconnaissance satellites is creating a strategic Achilles' heel. Satellites in space are fragile systems, their sensors and solar arrays vulnerable to physical attack and a variety of electromagnetic radiation. "There is a great risk," says one Pentagon official, "in the increasing dependence of our whole military system on vulnerable space-based systems." Others, however, point out that satellites are protected by the vast distances in space and that they can be "hardened" to withstand various sorts of radiation and even physical contact...
Both sides are busy developing antisatellite, or ASAT, weapons. The Soviet Union has what Pentagon officials describe as the "world's only deployed ASAT system," but it is primitive in concept and ineffective. Soviet ground-based ASAT lasers are expected to be in effect long before space-based ones. The U.S. ASAT program involves launching an 18-ft. satellite buster from a high- flying F-15 aircraft, but it is plagued by problems. Moreover, the Air Force now expects the fledgling system to cost $5.3 billion -- more than an aircraft carrier. Nonetheless, argues U.S. Vice Chief of Staff General John...
...time, in the Met, for this show. Its most beautiful panels, The Adoration of the Magi and The Circumcision, are crowded with relatively still figures and seem to come out of the old world of Titian and Veronese. But when it came to mobilizing figures in action in deep space, in the centerpiece of a battle between Christians and Moors, Zurbaran could only quote from Velasquez's Surrender of Breda without achieving anything like its seamless integration...
...folds and loopings of the monks' white habits in The Virgin of Mercy. It is one of the things that commends Zurbaran to modernist taste. But to Velasquez's circle it cannot have looked very sophisticated. For all his formal solidity, moreover, the perimeter of Zurbaran's space often seems as thin as tissue, ready to collapse under the pressure of revelation -- and sometimes it literally does, as when the back wall of the otherwise "normal" domestic scene of The Virgin and Christ in the House of Nazareth dissolves in clouds of fulgid light while the young Jesus, foreseeing...
Wearing a stylish pinstripe, double-breasted suit, Roald Sagdeyev, the director of the Soviet Space Research Institute, began by disarming the group of Cornell astronomers during a recent U.S. tour with a folksy story about a Russian woodsman. Then, in a voice strained from singing When the Saints Go Marching In to Soviets and Americans gathered at the Chautauqua Institution, he discussed the dangers of nuclear weapons and the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or Star Wars. Finally, the trim, 5-ft. 8-in. physicist, who rarely drinks and never smokes, concluded with his vision for a joint U.S.-U.S.S.R...