Word: point-blank
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...Europe with the Marshall Plan, frustrated its 1948 siege of Berlin with the airlift. All these occasions were milestones in the persistence of free men to remain free. But these tests came before both sides had large nuclear arsenals, and for the most part did not involve a direct, point-blank confrontation between Washington and Moscow. Now, in an ultimate showdown, Russia had given...
Baxter kept talking, and in 1947 the peacetime Army began looking drabber. One day Kemper found himself being asked point-blank by Episcopal Bishop Henry W. Hobson, president of the board: "What do you think you could do for Andover if you were headmaster?" Said Kemper: "Isn't the question, Bishop, what I could get others to do with me to help the school?" Team Player Kemper...
...practically in the shadow of the Wall, East Berlin security cops swooped down on a building where a fresh tunnel had just been completed. Eight men and women scurried through the passage to a West Berlin beer parlor at the other end, but one young man was sprayed at point-blank range by machine pistols. Three miles to the northwest, the Allies learned of the shooting and sped their ambulance to the border. But East German guards refused to raise the barrier, and the British army drivers did not force the issue; after an hour they turned back...
...Navy weaponeers used to thinking in terms of quick-firing 5-in. guns or huge Polaris missiles, the assignment at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington was far out of line. Their task: to make a gun that could be fired point-blank inside the human head-not to kill but to save. The unusual technical feat required even more unusual ammunition: a piece of hair only one two-hundredth of an inch in diameter and one-fourth of an inch long, which had to pierce something even less resistant than a toy balloon, and do it with such delicate...
...Point-Blank. As the government column inched through town, dozens of men were killed by rebels firing from windows and rooftops. Not until tanks blasted Puerto Cabello's hospital at point-blank range did its rebel defenders give up; students holed up in the high school fought on bitterly. In one classroom, Betancourt's troops found a huge portrait of Fidel Castro. They carried it outside, shredded it with their burp guns, and got on with the bloody, block-by-block fighting...