Word: zeus
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...Congress believed that the proper response to a full-fledged Soviet antiballistic-missile network was for the U.S. to deploy its own countrywide ABM system. The Army had been working on such systems since the late 1950s, first the Nike-Zeus and later the Nike-X. In 1966, therefore, the Congress authorized and appropriated $167.9 million for production of a Nike system (when fully deployed, the weapons would probably have cost a total of $30 billion). President Johnson and I believed the system would provide little if any protection either to our population or our weapons. We refused to spend...
...support in the scientific community, most scientists consider appeals to a supernatural designer to be an intellectual dead end. Over and over in our history, natural phenomena--lightning, the changing of the seasons, the nature of the sun and moon--have been explained simply by saying God (or Zeus or Odin) did it, only to have that explanation fall away as science provided a more satisfying answer. Maybe we really have reached the limits of intellectual understanding, but few scientists are willing to give up quite yet, even on seemingly intractable problems...
...been completed ahead of schedule--by some 2,500 years. It was free of commerce and awash in sportsmanship. In other words, it was unlike an Olympic event, ancient or modern. It was, as U.S. silver medalist Adam Nelson called it, "shot put Nirvana," held in the house of Zeus. With the sun rising over verdant hills, crowds streamed into the ancient grounds of Olympia, 200 miles west of Athens, for the shot put competition. With no stands and no scoreboard, the stadium stood as it had in A.D. 393, when it had last hosted the Games. The shot putters...
...taste merge into something profoundly silly--and there was no reason to expect anything different from Athens 2004. With the weight of ancient mythology, Olympic history and western civilization piled on its nervous shoulders, surely the Greeks would give us papier-mache Argonauts fleeing from an angry Zeus robot. Or a children's chorus performing a Zorba medley at the Acropolis. Or at least Yanni. But last Friday, Athens introduced a surprising new element to the show: class, or at least its cousin, restraint. History was referenced by way of crisp video from Olympia, but no actor-Pheidippides stumbled breathlessly...
...athletes who paraded into the stadium to begin the women's morning qualification competition entered through a 2000-year-old archway from a "holding area" beyond the stadium that houses the ruins of temples to Hera and Zeus the Olympian. In ancient days, of course, women had been excluded from the games as spectators, let alone competitors, under penalty of death. At 8:30 a.m., American Kristin Heaston shot her first of three qualifying puts to become the first woman ever to compete at Olympia. When later approached, as she sat on the lawn watching the men compete...