By: Rénald Fortier
Ingenium – Canada's Museums of Science and Innovation
“Fakes that pay off:” A brief glance at the totally fictitious nuclear-powered Soviet super bomber ‘revealed’ in December 1958 by the American magazine Aviation Week, Part 2
The three-view drawing of the nuclear-powered Soviet super bomber revealed in December 1958 by the American magazine Aviation Week. Anon., “Soviet Flight Testing Nuclear Bomber.” Aviation Week, 1 December 1958, 27.
Hello, my reading friend. I am glad to see that the theme of this article did not put you off too much. Although the Cold War is certainly not a particularly cheerful subject, the fact is that this latent conflict occupied the centre stage of the 20th century for almost 45 years.
As was said (typed?) yesterday, dozens, nay, hundreds of American daily newspapers talked about the article on a brand new Soviet nuclear-powered aircraft which appeared in the 1 December 1958 issue of the American magazine Aviation Week. Many Canadian daily newspapers also talked about it. They reproduced more or less all the technical details of the text, without calling them into question.
Some articles reported that officers of the United States Air Force (USAF) familiar with the American Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP) program acknowledged the existence of the bomber mentioned by the magazine. Such an aircraft would fly soon if it had not already done so, they stated. The office of a fairly senior person in the United States Department of Defense told a reporter that “We have been told not to deny any confirmation of the story.”
A member of the United States House of Representatives and chairperson of the Research and Development Subcommittee of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Charles Melvin “Mel” Price, flared up: “We have reached a critical stage in our nuclear aircraft program. Either we push forward vigorously to a successful conclusion of our efforts or we forfeit, once again, our technological leadership.”
The engineers who had been toiling for years on the ANP program did not deserve to be subjected to the indecision, indifference and ineffectiveness of the administration led by President Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, Price added.
The chairperson of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense Spending of the United States Senate Committee on Appropriations was also angry. Senator Dionisio “Dennis” Chávez claimed that the United States Congress would give Eisenhower all the money he needed to fly an American nuclear-powered plane.
As you might have figured out by now, Price and Chávez on the one hand and Eisenhower on the other were not from the same political party.
As you might imagine, the Aviation Week article was the elephant in the room at a press conference which took place on 10 December 1958. Eisenhower faced a barrage of questions. He stated, and I quote, that “There is absolutely no intelligence, no reliable evidence of any kind, that indicates that the Soviets have flown a nuclear-powered aircraft.”
This being said (typed?), Eisenhower added, the American government was not abandoning the basic research which would one day make possible the first flight of an American nuclear-powered aircraft.
Presumably, Eisenhower and his Secretary of Defense, Neil Hosler McElroy, very much realised that the Aviation Week article was intended to mobilise support for the ANP program. They also realised very well that the enormous sums invested in that program for more than a decade had not resulted in any test flight of a nuclear-powered aircraft.
By comparison, the United States Navy had commissioned 5 nuclear-powered submarines between 1954 and 1958. Better yet, 9 more submarines of that type, not to mention a cruiser and an aircraft carrier, were under construction as 1958 ended.
Indeed, the American intelligence community did not seem to be overly concerned about what was happening in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). At the end of December 1958, a National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the very well-informed Office of National Estimates (ONE) estimated that “within the next few years the USSR could fly an airborne nuclear testbed.” Some members of that extremely select group believed that such a flight could take place in 1959.
In the opinion of the ONE, yes, the aforementioned office, not the computer programmer / cybercriminal known as Thomas A. Anderson and Neo in the American cyberpunk media franchise The Matrix, the prototype of a jet-powered bomber recently named Bounder by the Air Standards Coordination Committee (ASCC), the committee which assigned code names to new aircraft from the Soviet bloc, could perhaps be involved sooner or later in the Soviet nuclear aircraft program.
By the way, the members of said ASCC then came from the United States (USAF and United States Navy), the United Kingdom (Royal Air Force) and Canada (Royal Canadian Air Force).
The USAF’s Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence issued a dissenting opinion, however. In the opinion of Major General James Howard Walsh, “an aircraft nuclear propulsion system could now be undergoing flight tests in a prototype airframe.”
In mid-January 1959, during a closed-door meeting of a subcommittee of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services, the Director of Central Intelligence, in other words the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), added, it was said, his voice to that of the ONE. Allen Welsh Dulles did not believe that the USSR had a nuclear-powered aircraft.
Perhaps responding to the skepticism expressed by McElroy, Eisenhower and others, Aviation Week published a brief article entitled “Soviets Announce Nuclear Plane Plan” in its 12 January 1959 issue.
That article stated that, as part of a French-language radio program, La Science soviétique en 1959, I think, broadcasted on 1 January by Moskovskoye radio, an unidentified announcer asserted that Soviet researchers had been working for a long time on the use of atomic engines for civil aviation. Better yet, the results already obtained allowed him to say that 1959 would see the first tests in that field.
And yes, the article published in January 1959 by Aviation Week (1st flight in 1959) seemed to contradict the one published in December 1958 (1st flight in 1958). Go figure.
And yes again, it was not beyond the realm of possibility that the information broadcasted on 1 January by Moskovskoye radio was intended to further confuse the situation in the United States regarding the existence of a Soviet nuclear-powered aircraft.
Allow me to mention that, coincidentally, the January 1959 issue of the American monthly Flying, “The world’s most widely read aviation magazine,” contained a rather positive article on the aforementioned ANP program.
In early February, an engineer who worked for the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Department of the Atomic Products Division of General Electric Company, Leonard Franklin Harman, declared at a meeting of the Aviation Writers Association that the article published by Aviation Week was substantially accurate. That retired USAF officer did not see why the USSR could not have a nuclear-powered aircraft undergoing testing.
A little after mid-February, the aforementioned Price made public a report of 40 or so pages completed for and sent to President Eisenhower, around mid-January, that is to say shortly after his press conference, by a fairly high-ranking member of the same Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Department. John Wilmerton Darley, Junior, claimed to be acting as a concerned citizen and not as a representative of his employer. Having received no response from Eisenhower or any member of his staff, he broke his self-imposed silence and sent his report to Price around mid-February.
Darley claimed that Eisenhower was misinformed by the staff around him. He was convinced that information regarding the existence of the Soviet aircraft was available. Darley further believed that significant evidence existed that an aircraft similar to the one described by Aviation Week had been seen. The existence of that aircraft was also mentioned by the Soviets themselves through the aforementioned radio broadcast of 1 January.
Darley concluded his detailed review of the ANP program with the following lines:
I believe that an overwhelming majority of American citizens would prefer to be absolutely sure that the amount of national defense is adequate for security, rather than risk even a momentary period of potential collapse in retaliatory deterrent.
The nuclear aircraft program can help to prevent this potential collapse.
In April 1959, increasingly concerned about the survival of the ANP program, Price and Major General Donald John Keirn, Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff of the USAF responsible for nuclear weapons systems and director of the United States Atomic Energy Commission responsible for aircraft nuclear engines, invited the Under Secretary of Defense, communications engineer Donald Aubrey Quarles, to tour the facilities where engineers from the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Department of General Electric were working on a direct-cycle nuclear engine that could one day power the American nuclear-powered aircraft.
Price believed (imagined?) that Quarles was favorably impressed by the firm’s hyper-enthusiastic presentation.
In early May, Keirn and the USAF’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Development, Lieutenant General Roscoe Charles Wilson, met with Quarles to encourage him to support the idea of flying a proof of concept prototype, presumably the aircraft known as the Convair NX2, and this as quickly as possible. They would subsequently affirm that Quarles had accepted their arguments.
That conversion could not be confirmed, however. You see, Quarles died suddenly during the night following the meeting with the two generals.
Those officers, not to mention other defenders of the ANP program, were, however, aware that the nuclear physicist Herbert Frank York, Director of Defense Research and Engineering at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense, placed greater importance on intercontinental ballistic missiles than on nuclear-powered aircraft.
Some defenders of the joint ANP program working within the USAF or the United States Atomic Energy Commission had also heard the joke concerning the program aimed at the design of an American nuclear-powered strategic bomber, the Continuous Airborne Alert, Missile Launching and Low Level Penetration (CAMAL) program. If a camel was a horse designed by a committee, a CAMAL was a horse designed by a joint committee.
Dare I state that the rumours surrounding the existence of a Soviet nuclear-powered aircraft were maintained by high-ranking representatives of American firms who had contracts linked to the ANP program and high-ranking officers of the USAF equally linked to said program? As was / is too often the case in such circumstances, why let facts get in the way of a military project? Sorry, sorry.
This, for example, was what the management of the conservative French daily Le Figaro of Paris seemed to believe. It supported its impression through a text, presented and translated in part here, a text published the day after the publication of the plethora of articles on the Aviation Week article, that is to say on 2 December 1958:
By a rather remarkable coincidence, this affair comes at a time when President Eisenhower, having proclaimed his intention to reduce government spending, had called for today two meetings of the National Security Council which will be devoted to the examination of military credits, the revision of the ballistic rocket manufacturing program and the transfer to a new civilian office of the responsibilities which until now were shared in this area by the technical services of the three services. Powerful interests of all kinds are therefore at stake, which would be served by the news of a Soviet ‘triumph.’
The author of the humorous (sarcastic?) column “Les commentaires de Wing” in the well-known French aeronautical magazine Les Ailes concurred, in a dialogic text, published around mid-January, which featured Monsieur Wing and his sidekick, La Goupille. The most important lines, translated here, read as follows:
At the time of the discussion of their appropriations, the Pentagon’s psychological action specialists usually launch sensational information intended to goad Congress a little to enable it to climb the difficult slope of voting on the budget without too much balking. Congress being allergic to the atom, its pomp and its works, it was a Russian atomic airplane that it got in the teeth.
A well-known French aeronautical fortnightly, Aviation Magazine, went even further. Its first issue of 1959 contained a brief article entitled, in translation, “Fakes that pay off.”
The magazine did not deny the existence of a Soviet nuclear-powered aircraft. Nay. “But from there to ‘swallow’ the super-bomber which has just been ‘revealed’ by the magazine ‘Aviation Week,’ there is a margin.” It supported its statements through the article published in Le Figaro.
Indeed, the management of Aviation Magazine pointed out that Aviation Week had already been around the block regarding the revelation of Soviet super bombers. It had already done the deed in February 1954. The American magazine had then published two very blurry photographs showing two new Soviet turboprop strategic bombers, the Ilyushin Il-38 and Tupolev Tu-200, similar in capabilities to the American strategic bombers of the Strategic Air Command of the USAF.
But it turns out that this shocking article was published a few days before the discussion of the budget of the Strategic Air Command which was threatened with certain credit reductions. Thanks in part to that article, said budget became taboo because of the threat which, the threat that, etc.
The management of Aviation Magazine pointed out that, as you will no doubt have guessed, my reading friend who has seen a lot, the Il-38 and Tu-200 were purely fictitious aircraft.
What said management did not know was that (charitable?) analysts from the aforementioned CIA were of the opinion that the management of Aviation Week was the victim of fraud. They even believed that it was not the first time, but back to our story.
Whatever the defenders of the ANP program thought, the political tsunami triggered by the article in Aviation Week soon calmed down.
Thus, in July 1959, during hearings held by the Subcommittee on Research and Development of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy regarding the ANP program, the chairperson of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, the very conservative John Alexander McCone, did not hesitate to affirm that, and I quote, that
I think any statement made by anyone as to when the Soviet might fly a plane is purely a matter of conjecture. I know of absolutely nothing. I don’t know of anyone in the Government that has any dependable information concerning the Soviet nuclear-powered program.
Better yet, or worse still, the choice is yours, during a press conference on American soil in November 1959, journalists asked questions concerning the now famous Soviet nuclear-powered aircraft to the permanent representative of the USSR to the International Atomic Energy Agency and head of the Glavnogo upravleniya po ispol’zovaniyu atomnoy energii pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR, in other words the main directorate for the use of atomic energy in the council of ministers of the USSR.
Vasiliy Semenovich Yemel’yanov claimed that no nuclear-powered aircraft was flying in the USSR. He added that if his country had produced such a machine, the Americans could be sure that they would have known about it, because the USSR would have been proud of that achievement and would have let everyone know about it.
Privately, Yemel’yanov readily acknowledged that the USSR had a nuclear aircraft program because it would have been stupid not to have one. This being said (typed?), he claimed not to know its status because it was entirely in the hands of the military.
In any event, Eisenhower and his team chose not to end the ANP program. The American president, however, gave his blessing to strong reductions in June 1959. The program underwent further cuts in 1960. Eisenhower ultimately decided to leave its fate in the hands of the administration, elected in 1960, which would follow his.
As you might imagine,
- the routine use of in-flight refueling by the American Boeing B-47 Stratojet and Boeing B-52 Stratofortress strategic jet-powered bombers,
- the entry into service of the first American intercontinental ballistic missile, the Convair SM-65 Atlas, in September 1959,
- the delivery of the first examples of the first supersonic strategic bomber in the world, the Convair B-58 Hustler, from March 1960 onward, and
- the entry into service of the world’s first strategic submarine-launched ballistic missile, the Lockheed Fleet Ballistic Missile Polaris, in November 1960,
combined with the still uncertain results and high costs in the past, present and future dealt heavy blows to the ANP program.
Would you believe, for example, that this program had cost Americans the modest sum of one or so billion dollars since 1946, a sum which corresponds to 18 or so billion dollars in 2024 Canadian currency? Or that it would probably be necessary to spend several hundred million additional dollars, a sum which corresponds to many billion dollars in that same 2024 Canadian currency, to obtain results worthy of note?
Indeed, the aforementioned blows ultimately proved fatal. The new administration led by a gentleman mentioned many times since May 2019 in our fantastic blog / bulletin / thingee, John Fitzgerald “Jack” Kennedy, ended the ANP program at the end of March 1961.
Over the following weeks and months, thousands of highly qualified employees of firms involved in that program lost their jobs.
The aforementioned Price was furious. He was even more so since Kennedy and he were from the same political party. Price, however, could not launch the slightest attack against the charismatic, popular and young president.
Perhaps feeling that the proverbial axe was about to fall on the ANP program, one of its major promoters, the aforementioned Major General Keirn, had retired in October 1959, aged 54.
The Convair B-36 strategic bomber used as a flying test bed was scrapped well before Kennedy’s decision. Indeed, it was scrapped around September 1958.
In an editorial published in early April 1961 in Aviation Week, the editor and publisher of that publication, Robert B. Hotz, asserted, after having mentioned the virtual abandonment of the North American B-70 Valkyrie supersonic strategic bomber, well before a prototype had even flown, that
We are inclined to shed a larger tear for the wiping out of the aircraft nuclear propulsion program as a far too early abandonment of what is still a revolutionary and promising line of development for a whole family of airborne vehicles.
Incidentally, the cancellation of the Valkyrie proved to be a very wise decision indeed. Given the service introduction, in 1955, of the first of a series of Soviet anti-aircraft missiles able to shoot down aircraft flying at high altitude, that very expensive machine would have been forced to go to war at low altitude, at a speed which would not have been a lot higher than that of the Stratofortress it had been designed to replace. Perhaps even worse, the Valkyrie could not have flown as far as its predecessor.
Flying a Valkyrie at tree top level would have made as much sense as using a Ferrari or Lamborghini to deliver pizza.
This being said (typed?), Pizza Hut Malaysia (Hello, EP!) well and truly delivered several pies on 1 April 2021 using at least one Ferrari supercar.
Having reached my weekly pontificating quota, yours truly will leave his keyboard for a few days. Get some rest. We will complete this fascinating story later.
Rénald Fortier
More Stories by
![A block of photographs showing some of the people involved in the bombing of beluga whales in the estuary and gulf of the St. Lawrence River. Anon., “La chasse aux marsouins [sic]. » Le Devoir, 15 August 1929, 6.](/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail_7/public/2024-09/Le%20Devoir%2015%20aout%201929%20page%206.jpg?h=584f1d27&itok=TppdLItg)
![Peter Müller at the controls [sic] of the Pedroplan, Berlin, Germany, March 1931. Anon., “Cologne contre Marseille – Le mystère du ‘Pédroplan.’ [sic]” Les Ailes, 2 April 1931, 14.](/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail_7/public/2021-04/Les%20Ailes%202%20avril%201931%20version%20big.jpg?h=eafd0ed4&itok=WnBZ5gMf)
![One of the first de Havilland Canada Chipmunk imported to the United Kingdom. Anon., “De Havilland [Canada] DHC-1 ‘Chipmunk.’” Aviation Magazine, 1 January 1951, cover.](/sites/default/files/styles/thumbnail_7/public/2021-01/Aviation%20magazine%201er%20janvier%201951%20version%202.jpg?h=2f876e0f&itok=DM4JHe5C)
