The Avro Arrow has taken on myths of epic proportions since the Diefenbaker government scrapped its development in 1959. According to such folklore, the cancellation was the result of a deep conspiracy that scuttled superior Canadian technology at the behest of a jealous American military-industrial complex. If not that, it was a rookie Canadian prime minister in his early days in office buckling before an American political master who wanted to suppress Canadian ingenuity — this even though Diefenbaker’s nationalist sentiments were hardly conducive to such imagined pressure.