Word: thermonuclear
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...world confronts the U.S. with nothing remotely like Vietnam. There is no global struggle with communism to drag America into every brush-fire conflict from Yemen to Angola. U.S. Presidents have the freedom to pick their wars and fight them as they choose, without worrying about setting off a thermonuclear war. The U.S. could go into Somalia and Haiti knowing it would never involve 500,000 troops for years, because the final outcome in those countries is not vital to America's national interests--we do not believe we are in a long twilight struggle with Somali warlords...
Imagine, then, if President Clinton came out with a new policy ordering Coast Guard cutters to machine gun all refugees attempting to enter by boat. Or Perot advocated a limited thermonuclear reprisal against Japan in order to curb the trade deficit? Certainly some Americans would whistle, catcall and respond with a hearty "Hell, yeah!" Most would simply laugh. Statements like those above would indelibly brand someone a lunatic not worth a second look in the American political scene...
Even before the FBI closed in on Ames and his wife, Woolsey faced a full plate of policy and management problems. Now that the cold war is over and the threat of thermonuclear war is dramatically reduced, the three major intelligence organizations -- his own CIA, the code-breaking National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency -- are under orders from Congress to reduce their staffs at least 17.5% by October 1996. And in the midst of the shrinkage, the agencies are being redirected and remodeled in ways that have been unthinkable since World War II, when the national-security establishment...
...knows for sure whether fusion on a large scale will be practical. The U.S. Department of Energy has canceled a bigger machine that was supposed to go beyond what Tokamak can achieve. Instead America will join the Europeans, Japanese and Russians in building the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; when it goes into operation a decade or so from now, fusion scientists should finally have a device that generates more power than it consumes. Even then it will take decades of engineering before any households could possibly draw electricity from a commercial fusion plant...
...what, critics argue? Evolution is littered with the remains of organisms that didn't make it, and prophecies of ecological doom have replaced nightmares of thermonuclear holocaust. The thinking animal is also the one that worries the most. It should. Wilson's intellectual, aesthetic and moral conception of life on earth suggests that survival may depend on a new age of anxiety...