GM,DS! is based on the true story of how the government commissioned Northrop and Convair to develop a trans-oceanic bomber during World War II, which became the Air Force's first dedicated atomic bomber at the start of the Cold War. Historic persons, dates and events taken from government records and biographies, are dramatized with a few fictional characters and events to tie together the facts of the story with appropriate dialogue.

The Northrop Wing, a technological breakthrough, or the Convair Stick, a huge, conventional design, would be eligible for billion dollar contracts. Then the Air Force Secretary and Generals blunder in deliberately choosing the bomber design that was incapable of performing the Air Force's top priority defense mission, and thus invited the Korean War.

Both designs have the usual development problems, but in 1946 Northrop finds serious issues with its Wing's always-failing Air Force-supplied engines and propellers. Mick O'Connell is hired by Northrop to troubleshoot, right up the military buying chain, while strange testing goes on at Muroc Air Base, and Air Force test pilots die when a huge Wing bomber crashes. Air Force test pilots then refuse to fly the Wing's stall tests, but Northrop test pilot Chuck Tucker completes the many stall tests and even recovers from a spin, proving the Wing is solid and stable, though the Air Force reports otherwise.

Tucker also witnesses in 1947 that the Northrop Wing is actually invisible to US long range radar -- is Stealthy! But the Air Force Generals ignore this discovery, even though stealth would enable them reach the USSR's secret warplant cities and military bases in the Ural Mountains. Instead they order 385 of Convair's huge, conventional Sticks which can not survive an attack mission, unescorted for thousands of miles, into the USSR. In spite of a Congressional Investigation in 1949 of this billion dollar blunder, Air Force Secretary Symington scraps the last of 15 new Wings, just a month before Russia explodes its first atomic bomb. Mick manages to get Charles Lindbergh, the Strategic Air Command's primary consultant and a member of CHORE, the USA's top weapons think tank, to give an evaluation report on the situation directly to President Truman, who demands a complete accounting from everyone involved. Destruction of the Wings results in subsequent wasting of many further billions of taxpayer-created wealth on newer less capable Boeing bombers.

In interviewing politicians, bureaucrats, Generals and industry leaders, Mick O'Connell is aghast to find that those authorized to spend billions do not, legally, have to be competent. He finds that our flawed laws give special privileges to wealthy persons like Convair's millionaire CEO Floyd Odlum, whose corporate charter requires he maximize profit by selling his country a flawed weapon system, betraying his responsibility as a citizen.

GM,DS! suggests in probable scenes how industrialists, politicians and military lie, conspire, sabotage, for personal greed or ambition. Genius Jack Northrop's amazing, innovative efforts to keep America supreme in the air are completely wasted. With the Air Force's blundering purchase, Convair avoids bankruptcy. Its owners profit, and success rewards the ambition of the Generals, bureaucrats and politicians with promotions, for selfishly risking our freedom... and the nation proceeds into 40 years of Cold War terror.

Today, 50 years later, do we now risk all civilization -- because our legal structure remains unchanged? Shouldn't Good Men Do Something?

GM,DS!