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This week's cover story is a sales report of sorts. The goods are TOWs, AK-47s, F-5s, MIG-23s, C-130s, Uzi submachine guns and French commando daggers - commodities in one of the world's busiest and potentially most lethal markets, the world arms trade. Associate Editor Burton Pines and Reporter-Researcher Genevieve Wilson began working on the intricate story several weeks ago, as the already staccato pace of major arms deals accelerated. "The most startling figure we found," Wilson says, "is that arms sales have increased 6000% since 1952, from $300 million to $18 billion...
...Egypt began receiving the first of nearly 50 MIG-23 fighter-bombers it had ordered from the Soviet Union; the Egyptians are also negotiating to buy, for an estimated $264 million, 44 Mirage warplanes from France, and are discussing the purchase of a complete Hawk trainer/strike aircraft factory from the British. Cost: more than $250 million...
...Johnson responded quickly by using new jet engines and a low-wing, streamlined airframe to produce the F-80 Shooting Star, America's first operational combat jet, which became the workhorse of the Korean War. In the first all-jet air battle, it shot down a Soviet MIG-15, the brainchild of Johnson's Russian archrivals, Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich. Kelly achieved an even more impressive performance from the Mach 2 F-104 Starfighter ("the missile with a man in it"), which is only now about to be phased out as NATO's dominant plane...
...reach it; it was only when Francis Gary Powers' U-2 was downed by a new Soviet missile in 1960 that the world learned of the spy plane's existence. Johnson's double delta YF-12 interceptor remained unchallenged for a decade until Mikoyan's MIG-25 became operational...
...even the MIG-25 cannot fully match Johnson's masterwork, the sleek SR-71 Blackbird, a plane that can fly so high (100,000 ft.) and so fast (2,000 m.p.h. plus) that it was able to cruise near Peking's first H-bomb explosion over the Lob Nor desert of northeastern Sinkiang province in 1967. It took photographs and gathered data without being damaged by the blast. After such daring forays, SR-71 pilots would decorate their fuselages with the silhouette of a cobra-like poisonous snake called the habu, which inhabits a Pacific island where...