Goodbye Beautiful Wing

The German and USSR wars for World Conquest started circa 1940 and 1950. USA-ers created special bombers to deliver the atomic bomb to stop the tyrants. This is the amazing story of these special bombers, and these persons. Fact: Though differing in design, a Northrop or Convair special bomber was to survive-and-deliver a 10,000 lb. bomb load trans-ocean, and this objective affected people and events on several levels: --technical bomber design R&D: Northrop's, brilliant, versus competing Convair's, blundering; --the (pictured) Presidents, Air Force Officers, bomber creaters, test pilots, politicians, bureaucrats, VIPs and other persons' actions that create, reject, build, test, sabotage, bribe, or steal the billion-dollar production contract; --concurrent WW II's violent actions and secret weapons, and the Cold War's nuclear threat to all civilization. All this underlines the historical importance of these nuclear bombers. Fiction: to help the reader, two things: a few Fictional Characters (identified), only to thread together parallel events; and, a few Fictional Events, to explain simply how to evaluate the competing airplanes performance -- which most senior Air Force officers either did not understand ... or deliberately disregarded. Revealed here from 1000 pages of Government microfilm of Northrop XB-35 and Convair XB-36 R&D projects, FOIA, interviews, records and biographies, we observe how incompetent military authority controlled technical decisions; and, stupid or corrupt politicians interfered in wartime weapon buying. How else explain the Air Force trashing a weapon that demonstrated tactical capability and Stealth in 1949? How else explain the complete waste of billions of earned taxed dollars to buy 385 B-36 aircraft tactically incapable of surviving flying alone, unprotected, for 3000-miles over USSR land, through nine radar rings and 19,000 Russian interceptors, to hit nuclear military war plants in the Ural Mountains -- not to mention another 3000-miles returning? The military swore to Congress the B-36 would do this.

May the military lie to our Congress? The Congressmen accepted these statements ... the Consitution does not require a Congressman to be intelligent and/or ethical, or to understand what he spends our money on. This story is full of these almost unbelievable actions -- but they happened!