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 off some stunt such as circling the globe nonstop. Reason: While the U.S. is spending about $100 million a year in a slow development of the twelve-year-old nuclear plane program, planners have made a command decision that a nuclear plane in the present state of the art, has so many military drawbacks that the program is not worth an all-out effort. Among the drawbacks :

¶Because of the heavy reactor and the extremely heavy shielding required to protect the crew, a nuclear plane would be too big, too heavy and too slow for modern warfare.

¶With present technology, a nuclear turbojet engine would offer only the advantage of endurance, and this already is largely overcome by long-range and in flight refueling techniques for faster-flying jets; moreover, both jets and the nuclear plane will soon be made obsolete by missiles.

¶A crash on take-off or landing with the reactor operating would scatter radioactive material over a wide area.

¶While advocates of an all-out nuclear plane program envision the plane as some kind of perpetual motion aerial weapons carrier hovering on the fringes of enemy territory, this concept is impractical in the days of heat-seeking defensive missiles such as Sidewinder because of the high temperature of a nuclear power plant. “It would,” said one Washington wag, “just about suck the missiles off their assembly lines into the exhaust stacks.”