Word: ticklishness
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...bomb-tamers of Los Alamos had a ticklish assignment: to make their bomb explode, but gently, in slow motion. How they solved the problem has not been fully explained. Uranium piles are kept from reacting too fast by inserting cadmium rods into the graphite. The rods absorb neutrons and check the action. The more cadmium, the slower the pile percolates. Some similar method may be controlling the tame plutonium...
Essential Skill. Radioisotopes are ticklish things to handle; tiny specks of some of them can kill. Only skilled scientists can handle these new tools with safety. Such skill is spreading rapidly, and as it spreads, the U.S. is acquiring scientific know-how-which is far more valuable than the perishable "secret" of the Bomb...
...York's education commissioner, Stoddard pushed through a $3,000,000 bill to set up a chain of junior colleges. Stoddard considers them the likeliest answer to a ticklish problem in a democracy: what to do with students who don't belong in college or can't get in, but still need more schooling. He also campaigned-unsuccessfully-for a New York state university...
Actually, the birthday frosting covered some doughy problems which hardly warranted such good spirits. The President would soon have to face the ticklish problem of vetoing or not vetoing the labor bill with which Congress is now in labor. Just over the horizon John Lewis was laying for him: on June 30 the Government's coal contract expires. Foreign relations were getting no simpler. But Harry Truman put off all such serious matters but one-a request to Congress for $25,000,000 to pay for a loyalty checkup of Government employees...
Leonard Bernstein, brilliant, brash young (28) man of U.S. music, triumphed in a ticklish test. In Manhattan he led Dr. Serge Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony Orchestra through a short but arduous young man's program: Symphony No. 7 in C Major (which Schubert wrote at 31), Le Sacre du Printemps, which Stravinsky wrote at 30. It was the first time that 72-year-old Serge Koussevitzky had ever let a guest conduct his Boston Orchestra for a whole concert in New York. Carnegie Hall was so packed that even Pianist Jose Iturbi had to stand...