Word: weaponize
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...sword of superhuman dimensions). The gladiators are placed in slings that are in turn attached to industrial-strength rubber bands. Boiing! They bounce off the walls and fly at each other with comic, alarming force. Piing! They are catapulted into the dome's upper reaches, grabbing frantically for whatever weapon comes to flailing hand. Spriing! They're back on the ground, whaling away at each other. As their ever encouraging ringmaster says, "You know the rules: there are no rules...
...that irony. Its high-bounding excesses of action simultaneously satisfy and satirize the passion for heedless viciousness that so profoundly moves the action film's prime audience, urban adolescent males. They can be relied on not to notice or care about the sequence's central irony: that the decisive weapon in the struggle between Max and Blaster is, of all innocent objects, a simple silver whistle...
...World War II, subsequent wars, subsequent peace, the position of science, the role of the military, international politics, the nature of knowledge, art, culture, the conduct of lives: all changed. Other ages in history were characterized by heroes or by ideas. The atomic age is characterized by a weapon and a threat...
...peace." But once World War II was over, American scientists were inevitably associated in the public mind with war. Hiroshima had entirely changed the popular image of the unworldly professor; he had proved what he could do. By the end of the 1940s, the Soviets had their own atomic weapon, and by 1953, less than a year after the U.S., they tested their first hydrogen bomb. Once the arms race was a fact, the U.S. seemed to need its physicists as saviors and protectors. Places like Los Alamos were transformed from emergency-inspired experimental labs to permanent national institutions. People...
...they want two megatons, I give 'em two; if they want 2,000, I give 'em 2,000." The measure of success is if a bomb tests satisfactorily in Nevada and then goes into stockpile. In that case Wood works with the engineer on the final design of the weapon--"weaponize is the term." A bomb must be "buildable, reliable and robust. If one little thing jiggles, it can't quit working." Design is as far as she goes. "You design it, you field it, you sit there with sweaty palms and wait for the ground to shake...