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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4e4d771 | Secrecy is essential to the command and control of nuclear weapons. Their technology is the opposite of open-source software. The latest warhead designs can't be freely shared on the Internet, improved through anonymous collaboration, and productively used without legal constraints. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 939035d | At a level of about 18,000 parts per million (ppm), the RFHCO would start to melt. At 20,000 ppm, the fuel vapor could spontaneously combust, without any exposure to a spark or flame, just from the friction caused by the movement of air. Waving your hand through the fuel vapor, at that concentration, could ignite it. The | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 6afffdd | A typical artificial strawberry flavor, like the kind found in a Burger King strawberry milk shake, contains the following ingredients: amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amylketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate.. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| b59e6ef | About eighty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima and more than two thirds of the buildings were destroyed because 0.7 gram of uranium-235 was turned into pure energy. A dollar bill weighs more than that. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 6386be6 | We have found out... that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists,' declared Ray Krock, one of the founders of Mcdonald's, angered by some of his franchisees. 'We will make conformists out of them in a hurry... The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 8b2aa98 | Indeed, market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 03d05e5 | Americans already drink soda at an annual rate of about fifty-six gallons per person - that's nearly six hundred twelve-ounce cans of soda per person. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| f16a439 | The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers in the United States is now about three times higher than the national average. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| d6e0a71 | The Soviet Union welcomed the new system. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, urgent messages from the Soviet ambassador in Washington had been encoded by hand and then given to a Western Union messenger who arrived at the embassy on a bicycle. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 1f5cc84 | Unlike the hot line frequently depicted in Hollywood films, the new system didn't provide a special telephone for the president to use in an emergency. It relied on Teletype machines that could send text quickly and securely. Written statements were considered easier to translate, more deliberate, and less subject to misinterpretation than verbal ones. Every | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 68801a9 | Even if the locking and unlocking mechanisms worked flawlessly, use of the weapons would depend on effective code management. If only a few people were allowed to know the code, then the death of those few or an inability to reach them in an emergency could prevent the weapons from being unlocked. But if the code was too widely shared, the locks would offer little protection against unauthorized use. The | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 479ff18 | McMahon predicted that "total power in the hands of total evil will equal destruction." The" | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 9077593 | What we eat has changed more in the last forty years than in the previous forty thousand. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 8965e34 | Some of the most painful and debilitating injuries are the hardest to prove. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 0715395 | A series of tests conducted by Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona, discovered far more fecal bacteria in the average American kitchen sink than on the average American toilet seat. According to Gerba, 'You'd be better off eating a carrot stick that fell in your toilet than one that fell in your sink. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 23c6874 | Like Cheyenne Mountain, today's fast good conceals remarkable technological advances behind an ordinary-looking facade. | health science truth | Eric Schlosser | |
| 5978b30 | The Air Force's demand for self-contained, inertial guidance systems played a leading role in the miniaturization of computers and the development of integrated circuits, the building blocks of the modern electronics industry. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| b14c64e | The first duty of the command and control system is to survive," Baran argued, proposing a distributed network with hundreds or thousands of separate nodes connected through multiple paths. Messages would be broken into smaller "blocks," sent along the first available path, and reassembled at their final destination. If nodes were out of service or destroyed, the network would automatically adapt and send the data along a route that was sti.. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 0e7a226 | The typical American now consumes approximately three hamburgers and four orders of french fries every week. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| a39e120 | The Redstone often carried a 4-megaton warhead but couldn't fly more than 175 miles. The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| e94dd29 | Andropov's concerns were heightened by the Reagan administration's top secret psychological warfare program, designed to spook and confuse the Kremlin. American naval exercises were staged without warning near important military bases along the Soviet coastline; SAC bombers entered Soviet airspace and then left it, testing the air defenses. The | Eric Schlosser | ||
| c776cac | Today approximately three-quarters of all $100 bills circulate outside the United States. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 32e4ab1 | one crucial fact must be kept in mind: none of the roughly seventy thousand nuclear weapons built by the United States since 1945 has ever detonated inadvertently or without proper authorization. The technological and administrative controls on those weapons have worked, however imperfectly at times--and countless people, military and civilian, deserve credit for that remarkable achievement. Had a single weapon been stolen or detonated, Ame.. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| a25b22c | To know a country you must see it whole. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| edc78e0 | No great monument has been built to honor those who served during the Cold War, who risked their lives and sometimes lost them in the name of freedom. It was ordinary men and women, not just diplomats and statesmen, who helped to avert a nuclear holocaust. Their courage and their sacrifices should be remembered. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 550b082 | Americans not only smoke more marijuana but also imprison more people for marijuana than any other western industrialized nation. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 0ff8821 | The current demand for marijuana and pornography is deeply revealing. Here are two commodities that Americans publicly abhor, privately adore, and buy in astonishing amounts. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 3acdb95 | Eager to defend the civilian control of nuclear weapons from military encroachment, John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara had fought hard to ensure that only the president could make the ultimate decision. But they hadn't considered the possibility that the president might be clinically depressed, emotionally unstable, and drinking heavily--like Richard Nixon, during his final weeks in office. Amid the deepening Watergate scandal, Secretary o.. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| ff77df8 | The drug use at Homestead was suspected after a fully armed Russian MiG-17 fighter plane, flown by a Cuban defector, landed there unchallenged, while Air Force One was parked on a nearby runway. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 6ebf4e6 | Once the Cuban missile sites were operational, Khrushchev planned to announce their existence during a speech at the United Nations. And then he would offer to remove them--if NATO agreed to leave West Berlin. Or | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 75be49a | No-one should have any trouble finding a party. | Alex Salmond | ||
| 5de295d | From 1925 to 1975, despite some variance, about 1 in 1,000 Americans was imprisoned at any given time. In 1975, there were approximately 200,000 prisoners. Thirty-two years later, after thirty-two years of drug war, there are 2.3 million behind bars--1 in every 130 Americans.100 Canada, by comparison, imprisons 1 in every 750 people. Every country in Western Europe imprisons still fewer. Pick any country and we lock up more people. America .. | Peter Moskos | ||
| d48ea75 | The cable and the X-unit both had female plugs. Somehow the cable had been installed backward. It would take a couple of days to disassemble the layers of spheres and explosives, remove the cable, and reinstall it properly. "I felt a chill and started to sweat in the air-conditioned room," O'Keefe recalled. He decided to improvise. With help from another technician, he broke one major safety rule after another, propping the door open to bri.. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 63f5c91 | Public lotteries are essentially regressive taxes imposed on the poor. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 7011ac9 | The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 5f2a4ee | And should Armageddon come, should a foreign enemy someday shower the United States with nuclear warheads, laying waste to the whole continent, entombed within Cheyenne Mountain, along with the high-tech marvels, the pale blue jumpsuits, comic books, and Bibles, future archeologists may find other clues to the nature of our civilization--Big King wrappers, hardened crusts of Cheesy Bread, Barbeque Wing bones, and the red, white, and blue of.. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 2aa7063 | The impact of McDonald's on the way we live today is hard to overstate. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 87b8656 | a relief to all of them that the | Catherine Coulter | ||
| 8a84c13 | On any given day in the United States about one-quarter of the adult population visits a fast food restaurant. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 76164c9 | A country with fewer atomic bombs than its adversary had an especially strong incentive to launch an attack out of the blue. And for that reason, among others, a number of high-ranking American officers argued that the United States should bomb the Soviet Union before it obtained any nuclear weapons. General | Eric Schlosser | ||
| e9437c9 | In 1978, the typical teenage boy in the United States drank about seven ounces of soda every day; today he drinks nearly three times that amount, deriving 9 percent of his daily caloric intake from soft drinks. Soda consumption among teenaged girls has doubled within the same period, reaching an average of twelve ounces a day. A significant number of teenage boys are now drinking five or more cans of soda every day. Each can contains the eq.. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| a1b85da | Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO) planes would quickly get off the ground, climb steeply, and send an emergency war order on a very-low-frequency radio, using an antenna five miles long. SAC began to develop a Post Attack Command and Control System. It would rely on airborne command posts, a command post on a train, a command post at the bottom of an abandoned gold mine in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and a command post, known as The Notch, ins.. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| b422447 | Kennedy thought that his commanders at SAC had made a series of mistakes--the decision to evacuate the control center, the refusal to open the silo door and vent the fuel vapor, the endless wait to reenter the complex, the insistence upon using the access portal instead of the escape hatch, the order to turn on the fan. Worst of all was the feeling that he and Livingston had risked their lives for nothing--and then been abandoned. Livingsto.. | Eric Schlosser | ||
| 27ebf13 | AT&T's telephone lines and Western Union's telegraph lines were the only direct links between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both of them would be knocked out by a thermonuclear blast, and most radio communications would be, as well. The command-and-control systems of the two countries had no formal, reliable means of interacting. The problem was so serious and so obvious, Schelling thought, everybody must have assumed somebody els.. | Eric Schlosser |