Word: underground
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...past three years has trouble standing up. The Pentagon confirmed last week that the warheads from five MX's at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming were removed after one of the rockets slipped from its moorings and fell as much as a foot inside its underground silo last August. An investigation determined that the missile's fall was caused by "structural failure of a support skirt," a device that supports the MX while it rests in its silo. Though the stumble set off warning signals that would sound with the firing of an ICBM, a Pentagon spokesman...
Neither project has received an official go-ahead, but the Japanese government has set up task forces in several ministries to think about underground cities. Says Nobuhiko Sato, a high-ranking planner at the Construction Ministry: "The time has come to consider urban planning from the vertical viewpoint. Underground development has a great and realistic potential for alleviating congestion...
...Underground. The word brings many unsavory adjectives to mind: dark, dank, clandestine, illegal. But in Japan the "underground" is becoming the new frontier and the best hope for solving one of the country's most intractable problems. With a population nearly half the size of the U.S.'s squeezed into an area no bigger than Montana, Japan has virtually no room left in its teeming cities. Developers have built towering skyscrapers and even artificial islands in the sea, but the space crunch keeps getting worse. Now some of Japan's largest construction companies think they have an answer: huge developments...
Taisei calls its project Alice City, after Lewis Carroll's heroine who went underground by way of a rabbit hole. The company, which has drawn up elaborate plans, envisions two huge concrete "infrastructure" cylinders, each 197 ft. tall and with a diameter of 262 ft., that would be built as much as 500 ft. belowground. They would house facilities for power generation, air conditioning and waste processing. Each cylinder would be connected by passages to a series of spheres, which would accommodate stores, theaters, sports facilities, offices and hotels. Taisei's initial $4.2 billion design could support 100,000 people...
Tourists and Florentines alike often forget their carefully timed itineraries so that they can follow the progress. Dutch traveler David Casale could not understand why the city was so apologetic. "It's absolutely fascinating. I can see you might get upset if this was for an underground car park, but they are discovering something important here." Mary Rau, an American visitor to Florence who lives in London, curtailed time at the Uffizi Gallery to stare at the hole in the ground. "See the archways they are uncovering? And they're bringing up shards of pottery. They're onto something...