Word: underground
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...strength of results of a single 1957 test, President Eisenhower's Science Advisory Committee estimated that underground atomic blasts down to five kilotons could be fully detected by seismic inspection stations. On the basis of the five-kiloton report, the U.S. settled down with the Russians at Geneva to try to negotiate a stop-tests agreement with an inspection and detection system-but fully aware that the chances of detection were slim below the five-kiloton underground threshold...
...even as the negotiators were talking, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was totting up results of the October series of underground blasts at Yucca Flat, Nev. The results were enough to curl the scientists' hair: instead of a five-kiloton threshold, the real minimum underground blast that could be fully detected was about 20 kilotons-about the size of the Nagasaki-Hiroshima bombs. Science Advisory Committee Chairman James Rhyne Killian Jr. broke the news to President Eisenhower before Christmas, and the U.S. expects to break it to the Russians at Geneva this week. Next soul-searching question: Should...
...rest is slipped into East Germany. Tarantel is designed for hidden persuasion: the size of a theater program, it can be concealed in a book, fits easily into a standard German envelope. Baer's remarkable distribution system includes mailings from other countries, including Russia, and delivery by underground members, who delight in dropping copies into Stalin Alice mailboxes and onto the bookshelves of the Soviet House of Culture. Replies to a standard request for reader comment ("Don't forget to use a false return address") show that Tarantel is regularly read all over East Germany...
Most romantic of all, however, are the trap door, the secret between-floors passage and the hidden room which date back to the 1800's and Professor of Latin Charles Beck. Beck, it seems, was an ardent abolitionist. It appears that he had these devices constructed for the Underground Railway. The trapdoor leads to a secret chamber at the end of which a laddered well descends to the basement. During the twenties this apparatus constituted great fun and games for freshmen and section men who used to climb up an down the shaft. Unfortunately, the passage was subsequently boarded...
Left exposed, the statues would have weathered away; underground, the fragments survived. Discovered and dug up 70 years ago, the statues were pieced together again. A large part of the museum's work has been to reconstruct the reconstructions. Artisans before World War II used iron bars to hold the fragments together. But now the bars are rusting. So Meliades is replacing them with bronze reinforcements, an operation he calls "responsible and sometimes breathtaking...