the Army's secret Manhattan Project. Atomic power has since been widely tapped as a key source of energy. At last count, there were 342 nuclear power plants in 26 countries, among them such unrich states as South Korea, India, Pakistan, Yugoslavia, and Spain. Some 146 more are being built, and others are con- templated: China is planning a dozen plants. Reactors supply about one-half of the electricity in France and Belgium, more than 40 percent in Finland and Sweden, more than 20 percent in Switzerland,...
In June 1932, a discouraged month and year in the history of the United States, John Roderigo DOS Passos sat down in his Province- town, Massachusetts, house at the end of Commercial Street to write a new preface to his antiwar novel of 1921, Three Soldiers, published when he was 25.
Three Soldiers was being reissued by the Modern Library, a reprint series so inclusively "modern" in its taste that Petronius's Satyricon was in it along with Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus and John Reed's...
the United States today, the atom produces as much electricity as the entire country used 25 years ago. Reactors supply about one-third of the power in New England and the Chicago area, and large amounts else- where. Yet opposition persists. The target of this 1984 poster: California's Diablo Canyon plant, first planned to start up in 1973.
The Wilson Quarterl~IWir7ter 198.5
90
It was just 40 years ago this season, soon after Hiroshima and the end of World War 11, that the U.S. Congress began...
In 194 1, as the undeclared war in the Hitler has often protested that his plans Atlantic escalated, President Roose- for conquest do not extend across the At- velt grew increasingly bold in his lantic Ocean. I have in my possession a campaign to undercut his isolation- secret map, made in Germany by Hitler's
ist foes in Congress. In a nationally government-by planners of the new
world order. . . . It is a map of South broadcast address delivered at the America and a part of Central America...
now, most specialists are satisfied with the safety record of nuclear power.
So argues University of Pittsburgh physicist Bernard L. Cohen in Before It's Too Late: A Scientist's Case for Nuclear Energy (Plenum, 1983). He cites polls showing that 89 percent of scientists (and 95 percent of those in energy-related fields) favor atomic power. Yet many laymen still rank the atom as a worse hazard than auto accidents and cigarette smoking. They are, Cohen says, "misinformed."
A study directed...
public agencies and private institutions
"The New Politics of Inequality."
W.W. Norton and Co., 500 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 101 10.288 pp. $15.95.
Author: Thomas Byrne Edsall
When Ronald Reagan won election to the White House in 1980, the nation seemed to have shifted to the political Right. Edsall, a Washington Post re-porter, argues that the shift actually occurred the mid-1970s. By then, he contends, both the Republicans and the Democrats had largely de- serted the poor and t...
Detective and mystery fiction have But much of the fiction today is on changed enormously since the the move, so violent, so swift, that Golden Age of the 1920s and '30s, neither the reader nor the detective when Dashiell Hammett, Raymond has much leisure to practice the gen- Chandler, and Agatha Christie tle old art of ratiocination. reigned supreme. The growing band of academics
No longer do the best murders oc- who study detective fiction has cur in the homes of the best people. pretty well...
One decade ago, little Portugal was front-page news in America. Would this NATO ally, in the aftermath of a surprise coup against Western Europe's oldest dictatorship, succumb to the Portuguese Communist Party's drive for power? Would it be- come "the Bulgaria of the West"? Washington feared the worst. Happily, Portuguese democrats prevailed. But the people whom dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar had long isolated from change could not go back to old ways and old dreams. Since 1974,...
May 20, 1498. Ten and a half months out of Lisbon, two vessels commanded by Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese nobleman, anchor off Calicut, a port on India's Malabar Coast. When the seamen go ashore, history records, the first question asked of them is, "What the devil has brought you here?"
The reply: "We have come to seek Christians and spices."
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to follow the Afri- can coast around the Cape of Good Hope and then to cross the Indian Ocean....
Thomas C.
Shortly after midnight on April 25, 1974, Lisbon's Radio Renascensa played "Grandola vila morena," an old ballad that was an anthem of the Portuguese Left. For a few listeners, most of them middle-ranking Army officers waiting in barracks up and down the country, the spirited lyrics had special meaning. The end of 48 years of dictatorship was at hand.
The ballad was the signal for rebel units to take up positions in six cities. As people were going to work in Lisbon that Thurs-...