Lost Nuke - The Last Flight of Bomber 075

No Canadian company has fuelled as much speculation about its demise as A.V. Roe Canada Limited. When its name was erased off the corporate map in 1962, A.V. Roe's most ambitious undertakings - the Jetliner, the Iroquois Engine, and the Arrow - were reduced to scrap.

In Requiem for a Giant: A.V. Roe Canada and the Avro Arrow, Palmiro Campagna supplies us with new information to help dispel the myths surrounding the company. With an array of recently declassified documents, Campagna investigates the star projects of A.V. Roe Canada.

Was the C-102 Jetliner technically flawed?

Was the Avrocar a failure?

Was the cost of the Arrow program spiralling out of control as historians have maintained?

These questions and many others are put to rest in Requiem for a Giant.

Early in 1968 a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine sank in the waters off Hawaii, hundreds of miles closer to American shores than it should have been. Compelling evidence, assembled here for the first time, strongly suggests that the sub, K-129, sank while attempting to fire a nuclear missile, most likely at the naval base at Pearl Harbor.

We now know that the Soviets had lost track of the sub; it had become a rogue. While the Soviets searched in vain for the boat, U.S. intelligence was able to pinpoint the site of the disaster. The new Nixon administration launched a clandestine, half-billion-dollar project to recover the sunken K-129. Contrary to years of deliberately misleading reports, the recovery operation was a great success. With the recovery of the sub, it became clear that the rogue was attempting to mimic a Chinese submarine, almost certainly with the intention of provoking a war between the U.S. and China. This was a carefully planned operation that, had it succeeded, would have had devastating consequences. During the successful recovery effort, the U.S. forged new relationships with the USSR and China. Could the information gleaned from the sunken sub have been a decisive factor shaping the new policies of détente between the Americans and the Soviets, and opening China to the West? And who in the USSR could have planned such a bold and potentially catastrophic operation?

The development of the Avro Arrow was a remarkable Canadian achievement. Its mysterious cancellation in February 1959 prompted questions that have long gone unanswered. What role did the Central Intelligence Agency play in the scrapping of the project? Who in Canada's government was involved in that decision? What, if anything, did Canada get in return? Who ordered the blowtorching of all the prototypes? And did Arrow technology find its way into the American Stealth fighter/bomber program?

When Storms of Controversy was first published in 1992, its answers to these questions sent a shock wave across the country. Using never-before-released documents, the book exploded the myth that design flaws, cost overruns, or obsolescence had triggered the demise of the Arrow.

Now, in this fully revised fourth edition, complete with two new appendices, the bestselling book brings readers up-to-date on the CF-105 Arrow, the most innovative, sophisticated aircraft the world had seen by the end of the 1950s.

More than 250,000 courageous men and women were enlisted in the RCAF during World War II. They fought in all the major air operations. Thousands lost their lives. Only one in four aircrews completed their bomber tours: some were killed in action, some in training, others became prisoners of war. All volunteered. These are the stories of the valiant Canadians who fought in this brutal war.