Word: destroyer
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...program, along the lines of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb, to build a defense system in space. He envisioned a network of orbiting sensors that would detect a Soviet attack as soon as it was launched, then trigger giant remote-control ray guns that would destroy attacking rockets or their warheads before they could do any damage...
...some of his fellow physicists to moan, "E.T., go home." Teller's brainstorm became Reagan's dream, and the dream became national policy. In a speech in March 1983, the President asked, "What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that . . . we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?" In December, with no fanfare, Reagan approved $26 billion over the next five years for research into a Strategic Defense Initiative...
...word merchants" in the chamber: "Help them to appreciate the power of words... to honor, to disparage; to encourage, to disappoint; to comfort, to embarrass; to edify, to offend; to strengthen, to weaken; to motivate, to immobilize; to give hope, to frustrate; to purify, to pollute; to build, to destroy...
...every great writer's widow or lover who wants to destroy letters and diaries containing the secrets of the past, there is some literary snoop who longs to publish them. Such a struggle is the theme of Henry James' The Aspern Papers, and that marvelous 1888 novella is in turn the inspiration for The Golden Age, A.R. Gurney's comic update, which opened on Broadway two weeks...
Ronald Reagan's ballistic missile merry-go-round simply isn't worth the cost. The President wants us to pursue the mirage of absolute security in an age when weapons of mass destruction make such security impossible. Only myopic could lead us to break a successful arms accord, destroy our European alliance, and spark an arms race for the sake of a new Maginot line which would never work. Spending tens of billions of dollars researching a fatally flawed idea, and perhaps hundreds of billions implementing it would indeed require blindness on a national scale...