Word: tanks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lebanon sounded once again last week. In the fiercest fighting since 1978, Syrian peace-keeping forces and Lebanese Christian militiamen squared off for control of Zahle (pop. 200,000), a city in the Bekaa Valley, 25 miles east of Beirut. For eight days the Syrian forces, using field artillery, tank guns and rocket launchers, pounded Christian positions in and around the city, which is located just off the strategic Beirut-Damascus highway. Christian militiamen in the city and nearby hills returned the fire with their own artillery...
...Eddie Thomas, a Jehovah's Witness, his new job seemed "a grave contradiction." He had been a steelworker in East Chicago, Ind. But in 1975 his employer, the Blaw-Knox Foundry & Machinery Co., eliminated his job and transferred him to an assembly line turning out tank turrets. Jehovah's Witnesses are not strict pacifists, but they believe in taking up arms only in a holy war for Jehovah. Since the firm had no nonmilitary jobs to offer, Thomas felt obliged to quit. Until he could find other work, to support his wife and four children he applied...
Since one of Thomas' co-workers was a Jehovah's Witness who stayed on the job, reasoning that tank making was too indirect a form of taking up arms to be immoral, the court could have concluded that Thomas took advantage of the situation. Instead, the Justices defended Thomas' broad view. "In this sensitive area," wrote Burger, "it is not within the judicial function and judicial competence to inquire whether the petitioner or his fellow worker more correctly perceived the commands of their common faith...
...morning sun glinted off the towering white trident-shaped stack. Out of the top of the great main fuel tank seeped puffs of steamy vapors, supercold droplets of liquid oxygen. Suddenly, just after dawn on Sunday, the ship's three main engines roared to life. Throttling quickly to 90% of their full 1.1 million lbs. of thrust, the engines caused the spacecraft and fuel tanks to tilt ever so slightly. Seconds later, they snapped back to vertical, and two solid-fuel rockets-fiery space-age Roman candles never before used on a manned flight-ignited, adding their full fury...
...stack rises over the Florida coast in a great curving arc, with the delta-wing spacecraft slung under the tank and the astronauts riding upside down. At an altitude of 30 miles, the ship is rocked by explosive charges that separate the now exhausted rockets from the tank. Under billowing parachutes, the rockets swing down toward the Atlantic for recovery by ship and later reuse. Meanwhile, the spacecraft accelerates to 17,000 m.p.h. Eight and a half minutes after launch, its main engines shut down. Other explosive charges spin off the empty tank and scatter its fragments like meteorites into...