Word: thermonuclear
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...imagery of aggression: every target implies a weapon and someone aiming. This had an inescapable point in the mid-'50s, when politicians and all the American media were pounding into the collective imagination, like a 10-in. spike, the message that the whole nation was a target for Russian thermonuclear weapons...
...book's theory makes a degree of sense. Science is usually an incremental enterprise, with most researchers toiling in the experimental thickets, trying to hack out a little clearing of enlightenment. Occasionally, however, a Darwin or Einstein comes along and with a flash of insight as blinding as a thermonuclear airburst, clears the entire landscape. Down below, ordinary scientists blink disbelievingly at their sudden ability to see from horizon to horizon. But their sense of wonder is tempered by regret. Tending your tiny patch seems like pulling weeds compared with such intellectual clear cutting...
...world without a future. It was Herman Kahn, a graduate of the Rand Institute, the Ur-think tank, who gave the nascent profession credibility with such groundbreaking books as Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962), which used sound scientific principles to predict with great specificity the likely effects of a thermonuclear...
...that the superpower rivalry has ended and the danger of thermonuclear war has abated, the theory could be put into practice. International legal scholars even began toying with new approaches to intervention, suggesting that the world might have a right to take action against a government that was committing atrocities or genocide against its own people. But experiments in collective security so far have simply proved the old rule: the U.S. will act when it sees that its vital interests are at stake--as in the gulf--but feels no compulsion to send in the Marines without a very good...
...exceptional election when Americans are not lamenting "How did we come to this?" In 1964 Lyndon Johnson was a drawling Texas mess we inherited after ex-playboy J.F.K. was martyred into his golden nimbus. Johnson's opponent Barry Goldwater was a thermonuclear psychotic. So thought everyone to the left of Mayor Daley...