Word: bomber
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Cheney has offered Congress a blueprint for cutting $10 billion from the $305 billion budget request submitted by President Reagan just before he left office last January. In his plan, Cheney hopes to spare major strategic weapons like the B-2 Stealth bomber by trimming smaller but costly programs, notably Grumman's F-14D jet fighter (saving: $2.4 billion) and the V-22 Osprey ($7.8 billion), an innovative tiltrotor aircraft made by Boeing and Bell Textron. The Defense Secretary worked the Capitol Hill corridors last week to make his case, while President Bush courted key Senators and Representatives over...
...defeat by approving a defense authorization bill that turned his priorities upside down. By a vote of 261 to 162, the House slashed spending for four major strategic weapons while reinstating the F-14D and the V-22. The House decided to restrict production of the controversial B-2 bomber to just four planes during the next two years, and to authorize those only if the Bush Administration agrees to scale back its $70 billion program. The House also chopped $1.8 billion from the Administration's $4.9 billion request for the Strategic Defense Initiative, cut $502 million out of Bush...
...even at the moment of its apparent success, the technologically revolutionary bomber faced a threat to its existence, not from hostile radar and missiles but from a newly skeptical Congress that has become increasingly alarmed over the plane's horrendous cost. By the Air Force's own calculations, each of the 132 B-2s it wants will cost more than $530 million, a total of $70.2 billion over the next decade. Already $23 billion has been spent on research and development. How, Congressmen wonder, can the most expensive weapons system ever built be reconciled with a shrinking defense budget...
...there agreement on the strategic justification for the bomber. Cheney argues that the Stealth is needed to maintain "the effectiveness of the bomber leg of the strategic triad," the mix of land- and sea-based missiles and nuclear weapons carried by aircraft on which U.S. deterrence has been based. Welch contends that bombers are regarded by both the U.S. and the Soviets as "the most stabilizing element of the triad." Unlike missiles that can strike in 30 minutes or less, bombers need hours to reach their targets and hence do not represent a first-strike threat against the Soviets. Moreover...
...circumstance combine to limit the death toll in what is nevertheless the tenth worst air crash in U.S. history. -- On the diplomatic front: a senior U.S. foreign service officer is suspected of espionage, and George Bush is accused of giving embassy jobs to wealthy but unqualified supporters. -- The Stealth bomber takes to the skies -- but Congress may shoot it down...