Word: weaponeering
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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Every seven seconds, doctors estimate, someone somewhere in the world dies of tuberculosis. Because TB is a disease that thrives on poverty, overcrowding, malnutrition and ignorance, its prevention is largely a sociological problem. Doctors, however, have long searched in vain for a medical weapon that would work against TB with the sure efficacy of, say, the smallpox vaccine against smallpox. The best they have found so far is the vaccine called BCG, which was first tried out on calves in 1908 at France's Pasteur Institute...
...from being the perfect weapon. Some doctors think that it can be downright dangerous; even its most ardent partisans admit that it will not do a complete immunization job in every case. It can be used only on patients showing no active sign of the disease. An added difficulty is the fact that no one can be certain just how effective BCG is until it is made the only preventive agent in a long-term experiment on a large mass of people...
Despite uncountable acts of individual and group heroism, the morale of the surviving U.S. troops had been severely shaken by the knowledge that all their shiny weapons and equipment, their sensational blitz tactics, their mountain of supplies, their tanks, trucks, artillery and air power could not hold back a horde that moved on foot, without air support, without armor and with hardly any weapon larger than a mortar. The American fighting man had moved a long way from the revolutionary rabble of 1775; he had become, in a manner of speaking, the British Redcoat of 1950-confident of superiority...
...Professor Robert M. Hawkins of Vanderbilt University's School of Religion thought it a military rather than a moral question. "To me the atom bomb is just another weapon . . . Any weapon is inhumane, and I would rather be blown up with an atom bomb than bayoneted...
There will always be a group of people who are vested with some slight bit of authority who are afraid of the truth, who are afraid of criticism. The threat to your Radcliffe reporter is nothing new. Nor is your striking back with you best weapon of publicity anything new. But what all this does show is that no newspaper, run on the principles taught by democracy, can be anything if it is not allowed to get at the truth and print...