He was a vociferous left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964 – 70 and 1974 – 79, and during the 1980s, he was the leading intellectual light of the movement against nuclear weapons in Europe.

In the mid 1980s, the atoll became a facility for chemical weapons disposal.

The Advanced Combat Rifle program in the 1980s produced weapons that were superior in some ways, but none improved upon the M16 series enough to replace it.

An article on California street gang violence states that " killings and drive-by shootings have evolved as the most frequent violent crimes committed by gang members since the early 1980s ..., with an abundance of large-caliber handguns, shotguns, and automatic and semi-automatic weapons -- including AK-47s, Mac-10s, and Uzi submachine guns ".

In the 1980s, a popular movement for nuclear disarmament again gained strength in the light of the weapons build-up and aggressive rhetoric of US President Ronald Reagan.

Only one country has been known to ever dismantle their nuclear arsenal completely — the apartheid government of South Africa apparently developed half a dozen crude fission weapons during the 1980s, but they were dismantled in the early 1990s.

In an interview in 2000, Mikhail Gorbachev, in response to the comment " In the 1980s, you warned about the unprecedented dangers of nuclear weapons and took very daring steps to reverse the arms race ," said " Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on Earth ; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act in that situation.

Oliver North came into the public spotlight as a result of his participation in the Iran-Contra affair, a political scandal of the late 1980s, in which he claimed partial responsibility for the sale of weapons via intermediaries to Iran, with the profits being channeled to the Contras in Nicaragua.

Saddam Hussein greeting Carlos Cardoen, a Chilean businessman who provided Iraq with weapons in the 1980s

The plan originated as a 1979 field training exercise war game, and metamorphosed into official Warsaw Treaty battle doctrine, until the late 1980s – thus why the People ’ s Republic of Poland was a nuclear weapons base, first, to 178, then, to 250 tactical-range rockets.

South Africa also manufactured several complete nuclear weapons in the 1980s, but subsequently became the first country to voluntarily destroy their domestically made weapons stocks and abandon further production ( 1990s ).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Non-lethality Policy Review Group at U. S. Global Strategy Council in Washington and other independent think tanks around the world called for a concerted effort to develop weapons that were more life-conserving, environmentally friendly, and fiscally responsible than weapons available at that time.

In the 1980s and 1990s officers began deploying non-lethal personal sidearms such as pepper sprays, and eventually electroshock weapons such as Tasers, which were developed for use by police and also found a market in self-defense by private citizens.

Hussein was internationally known for his use of chemical weapons in the 1980s against Iranian and Kurdish civilians during and after the Iran – Iraq War.

It is also known that in the 1980s he pursued an extensive biological weapons program and a nuclear weapons program, though no nuclear bomb was built.

Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs were assisted by a wide variety of firms and governments in the 1970s and 1980s.

As part of Project 922, German firms such as Karl Kobe helped build Iraqi chemical weapons facilities such as laboratories, bunkers, an administrative building, and first production buildings in the early 1980s under the cover of a pesticide plant.

In the late 1980s, the British government secretly gave the arms company Matrix Churchill permission to supply parts for Saddam Hussein's weapons program, while British Industry supplied Gerald Bull as he developed the Iraqi supergun.

Many other countries contributed as well ; since Iraq's nuclear program in the early 1980s was officially viewed internationally as for energy production, not weapons, there were no UN prohibitions against it.

The commission found corroborating evidence that Rihab Rashid Taha, an Iraqi microbiologist educated in England, had produced biological weapons for Iraq in the 1980s.

Many of these countries had supplied the Iraqi regime with the technology to make these weapons in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War.

Since the 1980s issues of power, such as those examined in Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without History, have been central to the discipline.

In the 1980s books like Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter pondered anthropology's ties to colonial inequality, while the immense popularity of theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault moved issues of power and hegemony into the spotlight.

In the late 1980s and 1990s authors such as George Marcus and James Clifford pondered ethnographic authority, in particular how and why anthropological knowledge was possible and authoritative.

Only during the 1970s and 1980s did television chefs such as James Beard and Jeff Smith shift the focus towards home-grown cooking styles, particularly those of the different ethnic groups within the nation.

A cappella music attained renewed prominence from the late 1980s onward, spurred by the success of Top 40 recordings by artists such as The Manhattan Transfer, Bobby McFerrin, Huey Lewis and the News, All-4-One, The Nylons, Backstreet Boys and Boyz II Men.

Grant made her debut as a teenager, and gained fame in Christian music during the 1980s with such hits as " Father's Eyes ", " El Shaddai ", and " Angels ".

One way of reducing the risk is through the illegal use of inside information, and in fact risk arbitrage with regard to leveraged buyouts was associated with some of the famous financial scandals of the 1980s such as those involving Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky.

The SDP favoured some Thatcherite reforms during the 1980s, such as legislation aimed at reforming the trade unions ( although the parliamentary SDP actually split three ways on Norman Tebbit's 1982 Industrial Relations bill, most voting for, some against, and others abstaining ), but took a more welfarist position than the Conservative Party, being more sceptical of Conservative welfare reforms ( particularly regarding the Health Service ).

Firms started highlighting their ethical stature in the late 1980s and early 1990s, possibly trying to distance themselves from the business scandals of the day, such as the savings and loan crisis.

Particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a significant push to understand the relationships between these climatic parameters and properties of ecosystem energetics because such discoveries would enable the prediction of rates of energy capture and transfer among components within ecosystems.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Brabham introduced innovations such as the Gordon Murray designed " fan car "— which won its only race before being withdrawn — in-race refuelling, carbon brakes, and hydropneumatic suspension.

Superconspiracy theories have enjoyed particular growth since the 1980s, in the work of authors such as David Icke and Milton William Cooper.

Starting in the 1980s, an expanding community of neuroscientists and psychologists have associated themselves with a field called Consciousness Studies, giving rise to a stream of experimental work published in books, journals such as Consciousness and Cognition, and methodological work published in journals such as the Journal of Consciousness Studies, along with regular conferences organized by groups such as the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.

The use of cadmium in applications such as pigments, coatings, stabilizers and alloys declined due to environmental and health regulations in the 1980s and 1990s ; in 2006, only 7 % of total cadmium consumption was used for plating and coating and only 10 % was used for pigments.

The 1980s brought a wave of high-technology startups, creating software such as Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3, and advanced computers, but many of these companies fell into decline with the fall of the minicomputer and DOS-based systems.

By the 1980s, several independent publishers, such as Pacific, Eclipse, First, Comico, and Fantagraphics had started releasing a wide range of styles and formats — from color superhero, detective, and science fiction comic books to black-and-white magazine-format stories of Latin American magical realism.

The 1980s featured some of the most prominent storylines in the programme's history, such as Deirdre Barlow's affair with Mike Baldwin in 1983, the first soap storyline to receive widespread media attention.

Paul Abbott was a story editor on the programme in the 1980s and began writing episodes in 1989, but left in 1993 to produce Cracker, for which he later wrote, before creating his own highly acclaimed dramas such as Touching Evil and Shameless.

In the 1980s, Japanese personal computers such as the NEC PC-88 came installed with FM synthesis sound chips and featured audio programming languages such as Music Macro Language ( MML ) and MIDI interfaces, which were most often used to produce video game music, or chiptunes.

In the 1980s, cocktails again became popular, with vodka often substituted for gin in drinks such as the martini.

With the swift rise of Islamism and religious groups such as Hamas in the 1980s, the DFLP faded among the Palestinian youth, and internal confusion over the future path of the organization paralysed political decision-making.

Temple Bar was the home of many artists in the 1980s, and spaces such as the Project Arts Centre were hubs for collectives and new exhibitions.