Word: poisons
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...Germans were also slow in identifying the offending poison. Though nearly 50 German laboratories were reportedly making tests, it was the Dutch who first isolated the killer. The substance, they said, was a bug-paralyzing insecticide called endosulvan and marketed as Thiodan. A sulfurous acid ester, endosulvan is described by its manufacturers, the Hochst chemical works just west of Frankfurt, as harmless to warm-blooded animals, including humans, even though one microgram (less than one three-millionth of an ounce) in a quart of water is enough to kill coldblooded fish...
...part, the issue was forced into the open by the Army's plans to send approximately 809 carloads of obsolete poison gas cross-country for disposal in the Atlantic Ocean. After a public outcry, congressional critics succeeded in halting the shipment, pending a study of alternative means of destroying or detoxifying the agent. While the immediate concern is the danger of transporting a deadly commodity by rail at a time when freight derailings are on the increase, the incident served to dramatize far more basic doubts about chemical and biological weapons. Last week President Nixon ordered a thorough review...
Chemical and biological warfare has had a long and lethal history in the U.S. In 1763, General Jeffrey Amherst, the British troop commander in the colonies, sent smallpox-infected blankets to the Indians. During the Civil War, both sides poisoned wells, a tactic almost as old as war itself. American doughboys were sprayed with poison gas by the Germans in World War I-and sprayed them right back. Since then, even during the mass killings in World War II, the U.S. has never used deadly CBW weapons except for incendiaries. Even so, experimentation and stockpiling have continued apace...
Propaganda Beamed. Both Russia and China could have figured to gain something from staging the clash. The Russians were quick to accuse the Chinese of "trying to poison the good atmosphere" of the Communist summit in Moscow. Peking might hope to show up Moscow as the aggressor before the world's other Communists. Clearly disturbed by the incident, Russia hastily summoned several of its ambassadors to Asian countries back to Moscow for consultations...
...accident that these events are odd. Certain branches of the novel of personal change have long toyed with extreme metaphors for psychological and moral progress. Poe and Hawthorne, for example, used poison and death in connection with love and self-realization. The moral weight they put on psychological experience resembles Freud's--whose ideas are so dear to American screenwriters. Ulmer is certainly Freudian--see Ruthless or Murder is My Beat. But his stylization moves him beyond Freud in his view motivation and personal development. The rapidity of the changes he puts his characters through makes these changes seem ambiguous...