Word: war
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...million ethnic Azerbaijanis, who share a Turkic language and the Shi'ite Muslim religion, live on the Soviet side of the line and about 4 million in the adjoining Iranian province of Azerbaijan. Stalin, ever expansionist, coveted that part of Iran and moved troops into it during World War II. Before Western pressure forced him to withdraw, he encouraged Azerbaijani nationalism and rigged an "autonomous" local government in hopes the province would break away from Iran...
Azerbaijan is turning into a permanent crisis for Gorbachev. There have been two years of something approaching civil war over the republic's mostly Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, where more than 120 people have been killed. In Baku, Azerbaijani gangs have systematically terrorized Armenians. Violence has also broken out in the southwestern city of Jalilabad, where two weeks ago mobs took over the local Communist Party headquarters and police station, and are threatening to elect their own leaders...
...balding, bespectacled German-born physicist named Klaus Fuchs walked into London's War Office and confessed to being a spy. For seven years, from 1942 to 1949, Fuchs had systematically funneled high-level secrets about U.S. and British nuclear-weapons research to the U.S.S.R., including plans for the yet unfinished hydrogen bomb...
Fuchs' confession and subsequent trial marked a turning point in the history of the cold war. Evidence supplied in the confession led to the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for what J. Edgar Hoover termed "the crime of the century" and prompted President Harry Truman to launch an all-out program to develop the so-called Super Bomb. Two and a half years later, thanks to the determined efforts of Edward Teller and colleagues at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, the U.S. detonated the first thermonuclear device, beating the Soviets to the H-bomb by more than three years...
...account is a top-secret history of the H-bomb written by Hans Bethe in 1952 and only recently declassified. According to Bethe, who headed the theoretical-physics division at Los Alamos during World War II, Teller's design began to fall apart shortly after Truman launched his H-bomb program. Teller's idea had been to use the heat of a conventional A-bomb to ignite a separate H-bomb. But Ulam, a brilliant mathematician, made a series of calculations that showed that the amount of tritium fuel required for Teller's bomb was prohibitive and that even when...