Bonds & Bombs

BEHIND THE SCENES Bonds & Bombs

P:The Air Force leaked the news that a plane carrying an atomic bomb had crashed without setting off a nuclear explosion. Plan behind the leak: to ease British uneasiness about SAC bombers operating over the British Isles. Behind the news is the story of how U.S. scientists have worked for years to build accident-proofing devices into Atomic Age bombs so that they cannot be accidentally set off in a crash--or even by blasts of high explosives. Proof of the scientists' success is the fact that not one but at least four bomb-lugging U.S. aircraft have crashed without nuclearexplosions--one between Dayton and Cincinnati, one at Travis Air Force Base near San Francisco, one near Albuquerque, and one over the St. Lawrence River in a midair accident in which the accident-proofed "nuc" was jettisoned safely without explosion--and quickly recovered by a search crew.

P:Within a fortnight after he had begun to campaign openly for the Ohio Republican nomination for governor, ex-Senator George Bender, now an aide in the Department of the Interior, abruptly bowed out. Behind-the-scenes reason: ex-Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, now board chairman of National Steel and the man with a firm grip on Ohio G.O.P. purse-strings, told Bender that the party was reasonablysatisfied with Republican Incumbent C. William O'Neill, could not standa bitter primary fight.

P:Two moderate Southern governors are workinga Damon-Pythias routine that is turning many a Dixie radical red with frustration. North Carolina's Luther Hodges was chairman of the 1957 Southern Governors Conference, engineered the election of Florida's LeRoy Collins as his successor --even though a nominating committee had already settled on Georgia's racist Marvin Griffin. Collins, in turn, was succeeded last year as chairman of the Southern Regional Education Board by Hodges. Last week Hodges worked another ploy. Planning their Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in Raleigh, North Carolina Democrats planned to invite as main speaker a tub-thumping segregationist, possibly Georgia's Senator Herman Talmadge. Hodges held out for--and got--his own choice: Florida's soft-talking LeRoy Collins.

P:Defense Secretary Neil McElroy is aware that his honeymoon with Congress and the armed services may soon be over. The problem: space. McElroy is determined that his long-discussed Advanced Research Projects Agency(ARPA) will handle development of future space projects. The services--which have their own designs on space--are complaining bitterly and effectively that ARPA will be a costly duplication, a fourth service. Presidential Science Adviser James R. Killian is arguing for a plan to turn the ARPA mission over to the independent, efficient National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, headed by Lieut. General Jimmy Doo-little--a plan pushed by both the Navy and the NACA.

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