Word: thermonuclear
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According to theory, a supernova occurs after a giantstar- substantially more massive than the sun-has exhausted its thermonuclear fuel. The star's distended gases begin to collapse toward its center of gravity, crush together and reheat to incredible temperatures of 100 billion degrees, and then explode in a fiery outburst as bright as a billion suns. Left at the center of the supernova is a tiny (about ten miles across) star consisting of tightly packed neutrons, or a smaller "black hole"-a star so dense that its tremendous gravity prevents even light from escaping. The 1967 discovery...
...curiosity. But all the while, DeLillo demonstrates his golden ear for the tin and tinsel of Americanese, and many of his dialogues skewer perfectly the soft spots in academic double-talk, adolescent vagueness, the jargon of nuclear warfare (as in Herman Kahn's own book of the dead. On Thermonuclear War), public relations yes-speak, and the excruciatingly serious military-religious language of dedicated football coaches. Take, for example, the language of a shouted psyching bout before the second half of the game with Centrex...
...such alternatives as harnessing the energy of the sun-or of the earth's tides, winds, or internal heat-remain little more than scientific pipedreams. Even the vision of controlling the power of the hydrogen bomb will probably not be realized, despite recent progress in the laboratory with thermonuclear fusion, before the turn of the century. How, then, can the U.S. meet its impending energy crisis...
...author concludes that "the au-tomatons-in-orbit, adolescent as their performance was at that stage, had kept the two giant thermonuclear powers from bombing into World War III at least once, perhaps twice." Another round of reconnaissance dueling came last year over the Middle East, when U.S. satellite pictures confirmed that the Soviets and Egyptians had moved missiles into the cease-fire zone, in violation of the cease-fire agreement...
...trucks all along the 25-mile border between East and West Berlin. In a matter of hours, the Communist soldiers had thrown up the hideous concrete-block wall that became the instant symbol of cold war realities. The Western capitals were paralyzed; to respond would be to risk thermonuclear war. Yet in accepting the Berlin Wall, the West was forced to live with the fact that families would be divided and a whole people would be left with no exit. That a city of 3,000,000-2,000,000 of them sealed in the Western sector -should be slashed...