Word: foolproofing
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...Livermore, Calif., warned against the risks of submitting to a ban on underground explosions. "Very few things in science are impossible," said he. "but I do not believe that there is any great likelihood that even in four or five years from now there will be a really foolproof method of checking underground explosions down to, let us say, one kiloton [1,000 tons of TNT]. No matter how we proceed we cannot eliminate nuclear explosions of the tactical weapons size and perhaps not even some which can. serve as useful models for bigger explosions...
Furthermore, they said the U.S. would be wise to accept the Soviet plan for a year or two, because even the best of systems would require a year or two to install adequate control stations. And in the next few years, scientists might actually develop foolproof detectors, or the Soviets might give a bit more on inspection. Most important, the Soviets had apparently accepted the principle of inspection (albeit with precious few specifics), and inspection is the starting point for any realistic system of disarmament. By making this start-at an admitted risk-the U.S., they held, would win respect...
...idea of a tunnel under the English Channel has fascinated the French, and to a lesser degree the insular English. Bonaparte beamed at the thought of his dragoons taking the dry road to England; Queen Victoria thought of a tunnel also, but as nothing more than an expensive, but foolproof, seasick remedy. "You may tell the French engineer," she said when one set of plans was brought to her attention, "that if he can accomplish it, I will give him my blessing in my own name and in the name of all the ladies of England." Tunneling actually began...
...happy acceptance of Alanbrooke's diaries as the handbook of Allied strategy. Bryant's pattern is the same: Alanbrooke coming up with the answers almost before the problems presented themselves; then low-military-IQ types such as Eisenhower, Marshall, Bradley and Churchill stepping in to upset his foolproof traps for the enemy. Triumph begins in September 1943, ends with a diary entry in June of 1946. The book's thesis is that Alanbrooke tried to draw the Germans out to the very periphery of Fortress Europa so as to take the heat off both the Russians...
...prosperous half-century, tiny Belgium successfully ruled the vast, mineral-rich Congo with what seemed to be the most foolproof of colonial formulas: steady economic progress, combined with almost no political progress at all. But as the virus of nationalism spread across Africa and the newly autonomous republics of Charles de Gaulle's French Community sprang up throughout the continent, the Belgian Congo suddenly caught freedom fever. Early this year, after Leopoldville, capital of the Congo, exploded in the bloodiest race riots the colony had known in a decade (TIME, Jan. 19), Belgium hastily promised gradual independence "without fatal...