Word: conquests
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Harnessing solar energy is hardly a new accomplishment. Nearly 22 centuries ago, the Greek mathematician Archimedes is said to have temporarily saved Syracuse from Roman conquest by setting the invading fleet aflame with numerous large mirrors. In the 18th century, the pioneer French chemist Lavoisier produced enough heat with 52-inch-wide lenses to power his experiments. Though Lavoisier's work was cut short by the French Revolution (he was guillotined), his history has not discouraged contemporary French scientists-notably Physical Chemist Felix...
...roots of American action in Vietnam and Cambodia are not to be found in any desire for military conquest, but rather in the government's determination to extend and perpetuate America's economic and social presence in those areas. The decisions to send troops and to escalate the conflict during the 1960's were prompted by the failure of other less drastic measures to insure continued American influence in Vietnam. Nixon's policy of phased withdrawal is in line with this one basic goal: a strategy involving negotiation and continued acts of military aggression is supposed to institute a regime...
Since Khrushchev's one-man show came to an end, his successors have replaced his shoe-pounding, maxim-spouting ebullience with deliberateness that has long since crossed over the border into dullness. Conservative, guarded, suspicious, they exemplify a whole generation of bureaucratic middlemen. Writes British Kremlinologist Robert Conquest: "Vacillation, the attempt to combine contradictory drives, has been the pattern. The predominant motive seems to be a desire to avoid all change and reform in the hope that no crisis will spring up and that the contradictions within their society and economy will go away...
...Muong Soui. In retaliation-and with significant U.S. logistical assistance-government troops last fall drove the Communists off the Plain of Jars and forced the evacuation of Muong Soui. The Plain, which the Communists had held for five years, has a political significance far beyond its strategic value. Its conquest by the government constituted a significant escalation of the fighting. For prestige reasons alone, the North Vietnamese felt that they had to recapture the Plain-and they did so last month...
...conviction for which he owes much to such 19th century sociologists as Herbert Spencer and Ludwig Gurnplowicz, both of whom, without espousing war, recognized its value in shaping human civilization. "Conquest and the satisfaction of needs through the labor of the conquered," Gurnplowicz wrote, "is the great theme of human history...