Hmmm. Guess It Needs Work . . .

By DAVID ELLIS/

U.S. aerospace planners call it "brochuremanship," the tendency of contractors to make wild claims about the effectiveness of proposed weapons systems. Now this liar's art has spread beyond Washington. A journalist back from the U.S.S.R. tells of Soviet military technicians who pitched a costly radar missile-tracking system to the Kremlin. On April 28, when the U.S. was scheduled to launch a space shuttle, the technicians triumphantly declared that the lift-off had been detected and tracked. Several hours later, NASA announced that the takeoff had been postponed.

With reporting by Sidney Urquhart