Word: sputnik
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...Immediately after World War II, with the help of the Ford Foundation, Columbia established its Russian Institute and Harvard set up the Russian Research Center to promote study in Soviet history, politics, economics and literature. In 1958, the year after the Soviets' triumphant launch of Sputnik, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which provided Government funds for Soviet-studies programs at such universities as Washington, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, California (Berkeley), Indiana and Stanford. By 1970, however, Government and foundation funds began drying up. Between 1967 and 1976, federal contracts for all foreign affairs research dropped from $40 million...
SPIRITS must be high in the Soviet Union these days. Last week marked the 25th anniversary of the launching that made Sputnik I the first man-made object to orbit Earth. In America, broad-minded thinkers like Isaac Asimov took the occasion to reflect optimistically on space exploration as mankind's first step towards a broader vision--"a view that presents Earth and humanity as a single entity." But Asimov's idealism has not infected American military leaders, who now plan to make space yet another theater of operations in the modern superpower cold...
...nuclear arms race, the space race is characterized by rhetorical half-truths, hysterical warnings and a sizable dose of governmental paranoia. Robert Jastrow, founder of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goodard Institute for Space Studies, has asserted in a recent New York Times Magazine article that "since Sputnik, Moscow has undertaken a massive military space program that appears designed to do nothing less than control space." But apart from shadowy references to a 1957 speech by then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Jastrow's case against the USSR relied mainly on speculation...
...some of the ill will generated in 1978 when a falling Soviet satellite scattered radioactive materials over a wide area of the Northwest Territories. It also gives Moscow another space first on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the launch of the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, on Oct. 4, 1957. Above all, it proves that a satellite several hundred miles above the earth can pick up a signal as weak as that of the single-engine plane. Said one of the rescued men, George Heemskeerk of Brampton, Ont.: "We should have been cooperating like this...
...contemporary technology when she says that "anyone in today's world who doesn't understand data processing is not educated." But she insists that the increasing emphasis on these matters leaves certain gaps. Says she: "The very strongly utilitarian emphasis in education, which is an effect of Sputnik and the cold war, has really removed from this culture something that was very profound in its 18th and 19th century roots, which was a sense that literacy and learning were ends in themselves for a democratic republic...