GM,DS! A Dangerous Billion Dollar Blunder

GM,DS! (Good Men, Do Something!), subtitle: A dangerous billion dollar blunder. Man's mind is bludgeoned by the meaning of tghe first n uclear bomb: one bomb, one bomber, one city, one day. Five thousand years of warfare changed in a flash. GM,DS! is a dramatization of a true story. Actual events, dates and persons, threaded together by fictional protagonist, Freedom Of Information Act info, government microfilm and other illustrations, of the development and selection of the USA's first dedicated atomic bomber which invited the Korean War, at the start of the Cold War. From 1945 through 1949 only the USA had the atomic bomb, and blocked Communist brazen threat to conquer the world. But to be credible we needed a bomber which could survive, alone, 19,000 USSR interceptors and nine radar rings protecting Moscow and secret warplane cities 4000 miles away in the Ural Mountains. In 1946 two new such bombers were ready for testing: the huge Convair B-36 'Stick', and the radical breakthrough Northrop B-35 'Wing', whcih could fly two miles higher, faster, and demonstrated b eing Stealthy -- radar invisible -- in 1948, as witnessed personally by former Northrop test pilot Chuck Tucker, who flew the bomber through its stall-stability tests and the radar test ... and was interviewed for this book. At stake in this multi-billion dollar competition was the nation's ability to control the USSR, the financial survival of Convair, the political ambition of the first Secretary of the Air Force, the dream of a perfect airplane of John Northrop, and the threat of Russian control of the planet. Two flaws in the USA's legal and political system -- placing incompetent people in positions to spend billions, and laws empowering the wealthy owners of corporations control of public wealth -- enabled multi-millionaire Floyd Odlum in 1947 to become a major player in the bomber competition when he bought control of Convair and became its CEO, and strengthened his friendship with AF Secretary Stuart Symington and his former Convair Board five-year-member Louis A. Johnson, Secretary of Defense. Johnson and Symington cancelled a Navy supercarrier and an order for Wings to buy more Sticks, and save Convair, near bankruptcy... enraging Navy admirals crying "Billion dollar blunder!" and demanding a Congressional Investigation in 1949. How and why the AF avoided competitive testing of the bombers, refused repair of their own government-furnished-equipment to Northrop, and falsified flight tests to discredit the 'Wing', are revealed by the protagonist drawing on material from the biographies of Odlum and his wife Jackie Cochran, Symington, Northrop, Charles Lindbergh, Generals LeMay and Arnold, Presidents Roossevelt and Truman, and others ... exposing how and why the government wasted billions on the incapable 'Stick' fopr hat was to be the nation's primary weapon ... ovbiously to save failing Convair from bankruptcy, and thereby endangering the free world by taking our only threatening weapon, the Stealth 'Wing', off the table in 1949, just weeks before the USSR terrified the world by firing its first atomic bomb. A legacy of engineering blunders, military ineptitude and lying, political ignorance of technology, corporate-owners' greed, spying and sabotage.