Word: thermonuclear
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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...
...propelled by thin sails filled by the feeble but inexorable pressure of sunlight or traveling on ion drives that get their boost by shooting high-energy electrified particles out of the rear of the vehicle. Other possible vehicles for space travel may be propelled by a series of tiny thermonuclear explosions using pellets of fuel mined on the moon, or by mass drivers employing electromagnetic fields to expel bucketloads of dirt from the back...
...become word. His style swings from confessional to clinical, from pop psych to steamy paperback prose: "Her body fired explosively, every muscle contracting, and her back arched grand mal off the bed from the abutments of her feet and her shoulders." A passage comparing his own orgasm to a thermonuclear explosion may start a chain reaction of giggles...