Word: ton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...beach. Suddenly, hundreds of figures swarmed silently down to the water's edge, where they had a brief and emotional rendezvous with their foreign visitors. The long-awaited and highly covert task that evening: unloading and distributing more than 1 million contraband Chinese-language Bibles. The 232-ton cargo of books had been printed in the U.S. and was smuggled 200 miles up the Chinese coast from Hong Kong in the largest operation of its kind in the history of China...
Although the report contains no startling disclosures, in its breadth of detail it is convincing-and even frightening. There are illustrations-drawn in rather crude Flash Gordon style from satellite photos-of the new 25,000-ton Typhoon missile submarine, an SS-20 launch site, the experimental T-80 tank and surface-to-air laser weapons. Maps target where Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles and intermediate-range SS-20s have been placed, chart the location of Soviet divisions, and illustrate the sweep of Soviet adventurism around the globe, complete with lists of technicians and advisers stationed abroad. To bolster its point...
...April 30, 1942, H.M.S. Edinburgh, a 10,000-ton British cruiser outward bound from the Soviet port of Murmansk, was attacked by a Nazi U-boat and destroyers in the icy Barents Sea. The ensuing naval engagement was brutish and long: after being torpedoed by a U-boat, the Edinburgh mauled one destroyer but was again torpedoed and finally, while drifting helplessly, was sunk by another British ship. Down with the cruiser went the 55 members of her 850-man crew who had died in the fighting-and entombed with them went five tons of gold ingots, contained...
...nervous Soviet grain traders are saying that the yield may plunge to a calamitous 170 million tons, or 28% less than the 236 million-ton goal set forth in the current five-year plan. The chief reasons for the pessimism are drought in the Ukraine, the Volga Valley and elsewhere plus chronic agricultural mismanagement. Soviets quip that the first member of the Politburo to die will be blamed for the mess in agriculture, but it is no laughing matter. Says Marshall Goldman, the associate director of Harvard's Russian Research Center: "The Soviet Union finds itself with a disaster...
...programs came up for a vote, he found milk-state Senators and others lining up against him. Agriculture Committee Member Richard Lugar, a Republican and former mayor of Indianapolis, came close to defeating both the committee's proposal to raise peanut price supports from $435 to $596 a ton and the system of allotments, which are Government franchises that limit the acreage on which peanuts can be planted. Helms was finally able to save the price support increase, but not the allotment program...