Word: tripoli
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...been quite 180 degrees, but it was close enough -- and sudden enough -- to qualify as a mighty abrupt about-face. After first insisting that his government could find nothing to substantiate U.S. charges that West German companies helped the Libyans build a chemical-weapons factory in the desert outside Tripoli, Chancellor Helmut Kohl last week admitted that Washington might, after all, know what it was talking about. He changed his mind, Kohl said, after the government examined "certain documents" that had been "seized in the past few days." As prosecutors opened a criminal investigation of the West German firm Imhausen...
...eruption came as the Reagan Administration was applying calculated pressure on Gaddafi, and on U.S. allies, to prevent the production in Libya of poisonous gases that could be used in chemical warfare. The U.S. insists that a huge chemical plant at Rabta, 50 miles southwest of Tripoli and ringed with antiaircraft batteries, is primarily intended to produce mustard gas and chemical nerve agents. In a pre-Christmas TV interview, Reagan refused to rule out the possibility of a military strike against the plant. On background, Pentagon experts even suggested that Tomahawk cruise missiles, which can be launched by surface ships...
...Western Europe jittery American allies wondered whether Reagan was once again indulging himself by kicking his favorite terrorist -- and what the cost would be. Military bases went on alert in Italy, where Lampedusa Island was the target of an amateurish Libyan missile attack after the U.S. bombing of Tripoli in 1986. Britain supported the U.S. assertion that Rabta is intended for weapons production, but the Thatcher government urged Washington not to attack it. The French, who are host to the chemical-weapons conference at UNESCO headquarters, were irritated. The sharpest criticism came from the leftist Paris daily Liberation: "Gaddafi...
...known as the "poor man's atom bomb." Poison gases, after all, are cheap and easy to manufacture. "All a terrorist needs is a milk bottle of nerve gas," says a British weapons expert, "and that he can get from a quiet lab in a back street of Tripoli." Thus even if a treaty could be hammered out to the satisfaction of Moscow and Washington, says Burns, the U.S. would not sign unless every nation in possession of chemical arsenals agreed to it as well...
...there I was, sitting at the keyboard of an IBM PC AT, my eyes glued to the screen. Game or not, my pulse raced and my hands sweat as the MiG-25 came threateningly closer. Finally it peeled off toward Tripoli, its Soviet- trained pilot seemingly unaware of my 17-ton, coal-black aircraft a few hundred feet below. Apparently the F-19's array of detection-defeating * components, from the radar-absorbent panels on its wings to the nose cone coated with ceramics to minimize telltale infrared radiation, was working as designed. But I had also learned...