JUST as the Eisenhower Administration and the Air Force were pretty well convinced that the U.S. could see itself safely through the "missile gap" of the early 1960s with Strategic Air Command bombers and a slender intercontinental missile program, Air Force missilemen turned up in Washington last week with a warning and a plan. The warning: reliance on plane-borne SAC will not surely give the U.S. the deterrent it needs. The plan: step up production of the well-tested Atlas missile. See NATIONAL AFFAIRS, Atlas at the Gap?

IN popular fancy, the huge U.S. corporation is a world apart, operating under mysterious rules and philosophies that are of little concern --or interest -- to the housewife or the corner butcher. Businessmen know that this is not so -- and perhaps their best proof is the world's largest firm: the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. Few corporations in the world are as intimately woven into the life of a nation as A.T.& T. It not only helped the nation grow and prosper, but helped make the telephone a universal instrument that changed the world's mores, entered its drama and literature, and became indispensable to teenagers and tugboat captains alike. Most people never notice the telephone until it goes out of order--and a good many believe it was invented by Don Ameche. But A. T. & T. always has its eye--and its corporate mind--on the public. For its working ways, and what it plans for the future, see BUSINESS, Voices Across the Land.

ONE nation which sometimes pursues business with even more single-minded ardor than the U.S. is West Germany, the economic miracle land of postwar Europe. In the past ten years West Germany's eager entrepreneurs have carried their country to the greatest prosperity in its history, partly by extending its economic influence into areas that generations of German military strategists coveted but could never manage to capture. For a battle report on one of West Germany's outstanding current trade offensives, see FOREIGN NEWS, West Germany Invades the Mideast.

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