"The Defense Department has been described as the most difficult beat in town," says Washington Correspondent Joseph Kane, 37, who did much of the reporting for this week's cover story. "The Pentagon can easily mask embarrassment in the shroud of national security. Moreover, with greater speed and efficiency than any other department, it seems to be able to spread the word amongst its 25,000 employees to clam up tight when something touchy captures a reporter's eye." In the eleven months that Kane has been covering Defense, there have been numerous sensitive issues for him to investigate including returning prisoners of war, secret bombing disclosures, and the new direction in nuclear strategy that is described in this week's cover story.

James Schlesinger, Kane reports, does not feel the need for as much secrecy as did many previous Defense chiefs. "He puts on no airs. He is accessible not only personally but also as the head institution," of an ubiquitous Kane says. "I feel that Schlesinger comes to his enormous task better pre pared than any of his predecessors. He is a thinking man's cold warrior. In an age of wrenching readjustment after Viet Nam, his credentials mesh perfectly with the intricate job of repositioning the military into the American ethic." Kane joined TIME as a messenger in Washington in 1958, then spent two peacetime years in Germany with the U.S. Army. After returning to TIME, Kane served as a correspondent in Detroit and as bureau chief in both Miami and Atlanta before going back to Washington, his birthplace.

Contributing Editor Frank Merrick, who wrote the story with the help of Reporter-Researcher Anne Constable, never served in the military. He began his basic journalism training in the summers during college by working for his home-town paper in Holyoke, Mass. After a year with the Associated Press in 1965, he went to New Hamp shire to write in-depth articles for a group of small newspapers and covered Eugene McCarthy's New Hampshire primary as a stringer for TIME, after which he joined our Boston bureau as a correspondent. Merrick has been a Nation writer since June 1972. "This week's story is really about whether Russia is growing militarily stronger than the U.S.," he says. "The real problem is that the Pentagon tends to release only the facts that support its arguments. Kane and other correspondents provided information that allowed us to evaluate these arguments, and I had to turn it into a story."

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