RUSSIA: New Bomber

"In spite of what American officials say," jeered Nikita Khrushchev in one of his rocket-brandishing outbursts, "bombers are useless. Bombers are obsolete."

In spite of what Premier Khrushchev says, the Soviet Union is still building bombers. The Soviet air force is currently introducing into service a supersonic bomber so new that NATO has not got round to assigning it a code name. A new delta-wing supersonic bomber, to which NATO recently gave the code name Bounder, appears to match the U.S.'s 6-58 Hustler; the new plane is presumed to be even more advanced. Soviet forces have been energetically improving and expanding far northern airbases from the Kola Peninsula near Scandinavia to the Chukotski Peninsula opposite Alaska. Crews of some 1,000 medium Badger bombers and 200 heavy Bisons have been training hard at airborne refueling operations, are currently rated on a par with U.S. SAC crews. Some of these planes have been seen landing on floating ice islands, which the Russians maintain as emergency landing strips in the Arctic.

The Soviet military has shown no interest in matching the U.S. effort to develop small or "clean" atomic bombs. As far as Western intelligence can establish, the Russians' chief effort is to make the bombs for these bombers as big and dirty as possible.