Sentence of Death?

Past Nelson's Column and on up Piccadilly to Hyde Park marched 10,000 irate Britons bearing mock coffins and neatly lettered banners. "We backed you at the poll," read the slogans. "Don't put us on the dole." Gloomed another: "Prepare to meet thy doom." The demonstrators were British aircraft workers, and the object of their protest last week was Prime Minister Harold Wilson's troubled Labor government.

The cause of the uproar was the threatened cancellation of Britain's all-purpose TSR-2 bomber. A superbly sophisticated airplane that can fly at twice the speed of sound twelve miles high, or barrel along on the deck to elude enemy radar, the TSR-2 was first intended to be a light bomber. Later the plane was modified for direct support of ground troops, replacing the canceled Blue Water artillery missile. Then two years ago, when the U.S. decided to scrub its Skybolt air-to-ground thermonuclear missile, which had been destined for sale to the R.A.F., TSR-2 was again modified--this time to play the role of a "hedgehopping" strategic strike and reconnaissance bomber.

In the process, the cost of the 140 planes needed rose from $1.1 billion to nearly $2.25 billion--some $14 million apiece. Though two prototypes are already flying and 20 others are near completion, Wilson and his Defense Minister Denis Healey began to wonder if Britain could afford such a luxury weapons system.

Replacement of TSR-2 planes with less expensive ($5.6 million each) U.S.-built F-111 tactical fighter-bombers (TIME, Jan. 15) would bring about considerable savings. But it would also put 50,000 of Britain's 265,000 aircraft workers out of jobs and strike a damaging technological blow to the nation's once proud aircraft industry. In an unguarded moment, Healey, who admires tough, cost-conscious U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, dismissed such criticism by saying it was not his job to "wetnurse overgrown and mentally retarded children in the domestic economy."

Furious workers, feeling that they had been betrayed by the very men they had voted into power, raged against Air Ministry "cod heads," and Wilson at week's end invited top industry and labor leaders to Chequers in an effort to calm the situation.

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