Word: weaponize
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...equally significant level, the issue was not simply how much should be spent but how it should be spent. Some 34 weapons systems were initially killed, mainly by the House, but the conferees ended up restoring twelve of the major ones. Those that failed to regain funding were mostly "systems" that scarcely deserved the term: 250 forklift trucks (costing $26.3 million) and 1,413 motorcycles ($5.6 million), for example. Ironically, virtually the only concession granted by the Senate was to go along with the desire of the House to spend $100 million more for research on a future weapon...
...conference. As it turned out, the proposals they put forth were radically different. Responding in part to a Soviet complaint that a recent U.S. underground test of a nuclear device had exceeded the 150-kiloton limit permissible under the 1974 Treaty on the Limitation of Underground Nuclear Weapon Tests, President Reagan, in a letter to Gorbachev, invited the Soviet Union to send experts to monitor the next U.S. test in Nevada. That essentially painless suggestion, similar to an offer Reagan made last year, was intended to show U.S. goodwill in developing arms-control-verification procedures that Washington has long sought...
...going to be used. The people at Los Alamos now work on things that are never supposed to be used. "And we don't want to use them. Nobody wants to see these guys used." Nor does she feel that there is something antilogical or frustrating in designing a weapon for the explicit purpose of not using it. The "in-point," she says, is in the test or in the stockpile. "We have a fellow here who hangs a peace sign from his badge...
...easy to link the two as the same source of discomfort, and since the power of the state and the Bomb grew up together, they may be confused unconsciously. The trouble is that so many threats are attached to modern life that even something as blatant as a nuclear weapon cannot always be distinguished in an array that includes every terror from cancer and insanity to a telephone call in the middle of the night...
...Bomb was used and the enormity of its effects realized, it had the impact of Copernicus, Darwin, Freud--of any monumental historical theory that proved, fundamentally, how small people are, how accidental their prominence, how subject to external manipulation. When the Bomb dropped, people not only saw a weapon that could boil the planet and create a death-in-life; they saw yet one more proof of their impotence. We live in a world of "virile weapons and impotent men," wrote the French historian, Raymond Aron, shortly before his death in 1983. We saw a vision of the future...