February 7, 1961: No Missile Gap, US To Help Latin American Nations, Safe Cigarettes Proposed

"Studies made by the Kennedy Administration since Inauguration Day show tentatively that no 'missile gap' exists in favor of the Soviet Union," the New York Times reports on this day in 1961.

"The conclusion appeared to back the views of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who told Congress last month that the missile gap 'shows every sign' of being a fiction."

"Secretary of State Dean Rusk said today that the United States was ready to cooperate with other American states in ending tyranny in the hemisphere, whether that tyranny is of the Left or Right," the Times reports.

"A new theory on how cigarette smoking may be associated with lung cancer has been proposed by a General Electric Research Laboratory physicist. According to an article in the Jan. 21 issue of Nature, a British scientific journal, the glowing tip of a cigarette generates a cloud of electrically charged particles. The particles, when inhaled, may be the materials that change normal tissues to cancerous tissues. If this is true, it was suggested by Dr. Kenneth H. Kingdon, the author, the effect could be 'completely suppressed' by smoking cigarettes that were enclosed in a metallic screen," the New York Times reports.