This is a crossing of information here but since the area was mentioned this needs to be here,,,
Conspiracy?
and take a look at this AMY
"In 1980, Jack Northrop finally told his side of the story to the press. He claimed that the YB-49 program had been cancelled by the Air Force not because of any insoluble technical problems but because he refused to obey an order to merge Northrop with Convair. He said that he had kept quiet all these years because he feared that the Pentagon would boycott his company if he disclosed the story to the public. He claimed that Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington had issued the merger order slightly after Northrop had won the RB-49 contract in June of 1948. Symington claimed at that time that the Air Force could not afford to support any new aircraft companies on its declining post-war budget, and that unless Northrop agreed to the merger, the flying wing bomber would not be built at all. Jack Northrop did meet with Floyd Odlum, head of Atlas Corporation, a Wall Street holding company for Convair, to discuss a possible merger, but the talks went nowhere. Jack Northrop said later that he had built up his company over the years and owed a debt of loyalty to his employees and was not about to have his flying wing built by anyone other than his people working at the Northrop factory in Hawthorne, California. Shortly thereafter, Secretary Symington abruptly ordered that the flying wing program be cancelled. As part of the cancellation order, the Air Force ordered that seven of the Flying Wings then under conversion be destroyed.
The YB-49 cancellation story became part of a congressional investigation that took place in June of 1949 in the wake of the awarding of the strategic bomber contract to the B-36, with charges of undue influence and favoritism toward Convair being aired. At that time, the Secretary of Defense was Louis A. Johnson, who had replaced James Forrestal on March 28, 1949. On April 23, 1949 Secretary Johnson abruptly cancelled the large aircraft carrier, the *United States*, which had been ordered by his predecessor to provide the Navy with strategic bombing capability, and went ahead with plans for a fleet of B-36D long-range strategic bombers. The Navy was enraged at the cancellation of its supercarrier, but the Air Force insisted that strategic bombing was strictly an Air Force responsibility. At that time, both President Harry Truman and Defense Secretary Johnson were under severe budgetary constraints, and felt that the government could not afford both new strategic bombers and a new carrier force. However, there were doubts expressed that the B-36 could defend itself against Soviet jet fighters, and there were concerns that the Air Force had spent a fortune on what would turn out to be a sitting duck.