ARMED FORCES: Slow Bird

"Once again," said the trade magazine Aviation Week in an angry editorial the Soviets have beaten us needlessly to a significant technical punch." What provoked Aviation Week to such fury was its own story, not to be confirmed elsewhere, that in the last two months a 'wide variety of foreign observers" had seen the military prototype of a nuclear-powered plane flying over Moscow. For its part, the Pentagon was 1) skeptical that the Russians were already flying a nuclear plane, 2) well braced to ride out the propaganda storm if the Russians do fly the first A-plane and pull...

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