A GREAT deal of punditry has been written about the state of U.S. missilery, but usually without much firm underpinning of fact. To find out how the U.S. missile program is really faring. TIME assigned its top missile reporters to ferret out--in Washington, at Florida's Cape Canaveral test center, at manufacturing plants across the country--all the missile facts that can be printed without giving away national secrets. For a firmly underpinned countdown on the U.S.'s 38 metal-bird projects, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS, The U.S. Missile Program.

ARISTOTLE foresaw the submarine, and Leonardo da Vinci designed one. But the man who made the U.S. Navy's first practical submersible in 1896 was a mustachioed immigrant from County Clare, Ireland: John Philip Holland. In 1899 he helped found the Electric Boat Co. to penetrate the unknown depths of the sea. Nearly 60 years later, his company has grown into an arms colossus whose plans call for exploring the uncharted reaches of outer space. For the story of the transformation--and what it means in the race with Russia--see BUSINESS, Builder of the Atlas.

LIKE many another Russian, Mark Vishniak, 75, chief of TIME'S Russian desk, made the journey from Moscow to Manhattan, but there were many stages on the way. A graduate of Moscow University, Vishniak became a Moscow journalist and lawyer as well as an underground fighter for the democratization of the Czarist regime. With the overthrow of the Romanovs, he served under the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky, was a member of the committee that drew up the electoral laws for the Constituent Assembly. Fifteen months after the Assembly's suppression by the Bolsheviks, Vishniak escaped from Russia with the police at his heels, made his way to Odessa and from there to France, where he lectured at the Paris Institute of Slavic Studies and at the Academy of International Law at The Hague. In 1940 he came to the U.S., lectured at Cornell and the University of Colorado, came to TIME in 1946. For Vishniak's account of what happened on the fateful meeting of the Constituent Assembly, see FOREIGN NEWS, The Day Democracy Died in Russia.

MR. ESTRADA wants to see you immediately," said a Venezuelan plain-clothes cop to TIME Correspondent Bruce Henderson early last week; a few minutes later, after a ride in a paddy wagon, Henderson was waiting in the grimy basement prisoner pen of Caracas' Seguridad National, run by Pedro Estrada. Top Cop Estrada held the correspondent long enough to implant the idea that over-zealous reporting might get Henderson jailed or booted out of the country. Henderson declined to get the idea, at week's end had the stimulating duty of reporting that Estrada himself was ousted and exiled. See HEMISPHERE, Sullen Bargain.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.