Word: third
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nitpicking aside, flaws like these cast doubt on the most basic premise of his book. The Third World War is a call to rearmament, a shrill blast of the trumpet for Western governments to boost their military expenditures now, before it's too late and the crawling armies of Bolshevism engulf what Hackett calls "the free nations of the Western world." He believes the advent of "flexible response" military policies in the sixties--abandoning automatic massive nuclear retaliation in favor of both conventional and nuclear forces--makes land war in Europe a distinct possibility over the next decade...
Hackett really loses his credibility, though, when he shyly evades the issues which should be at the core of any "third world war" scenario. Nuclear deterrence is a distasteful and outmoded phrase to General Sir John. In his rush to prove that "flexible response" makes a 1980s European land war a possibility, he conveniently forgets that this policy evolved to meet Soviet threats, real or perceived, in odd corners of the world. Places like Vietnam, not West Germany. European strategic thought should still be based firmly on the existence of nuclear stockpiles on both sides. If Hackett represents a style...
Towards the end The Third World War degenerates into pure fantasy, the pipe-dream of Cold Warrior too old to stay on the front line but too fevered to give up the good fight. China and Japan have formed a "co-prosperity sphere" in Hackett's rosy future, and play no part in the war. Valiant Afrikaaners defend their homeland from the incompetent assaults of Soviet-supplied Namibians and Zimbabwians. As the Soviet drive into West Germany falters, Soviet satellites rebel, soldiers stop fighting, and a high-level coup in the Kremlin leads to a break-up of the entire...
...This is followed by three rapid epiphanies. First, that his life was a gift to himself and others and that even his share of sunlight and shadow did not belong to him alone. Second, that "he was not trapped into surviving by the currency of the acceptably real." Third, that he could die then and there, "Bred to a harder thing/ than Triumph . . . / be secret and exult,/ Because of all things known/ that is most difficult...
...bizarre ceremony, performed in a scruffy campground outside Demotte, Ind., was not some stunt but a modern pagan "handfasting," or wedding. It was one of the highlights of the Third Annual Pan Pagan Festival, a four-day conclave that brought together a witches' brew of 325 paganists, occultists and, well, witches from 26 states and Canada...