Fifteen years after American test pilot Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier, a new front opened in the Cold War. With the Americans and Soviets still engaged in an all-out sprint to win the Space Race, both sides of the Iron Curtain launched a battle for supersonic supremacy. Months before the British and French governments signed an agreement in 1962 to jointly develop the world’s first supersonic passenger aircraft, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had secretly ordered his top aviation engineers to do the
