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-Land of the Free
Declassified footage shows how B-52 crews would conduct NUCLEAR STRIKES during Cold War - and how to get home safely
2023-03-28
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news]
Posted by:Skidmark

#8  Released just after The Rooskies told the world that Belarus would be hosting some of their nuke forces. In the words of my 8th grade math instructor: "Crimeinitleys!"

Long welding goggles and iodine pills?



Posted by: Anomalous Sources   2023-03-28 17:32  

#7  
Posted by: 3dc   2023-03-28 16:57  

#6  Re #3: Thank you for your service, Mike Kozlowski. I recall seeing many B52s over Omaha in my youth. Loud and dirty they were, but I thought they were so cool.

I watched the video in honor of a B52 pilot who has now passed away. I met him about 10 years ago, and never would have guessed he was a B52 pilot. He was a good man indeed. After meeting him, and seeing his inner strengths, I came to know he was at the top of the heap.
SAC had the best and the brightest back then, and hopefully they still do.
Posted by: Victor Emmanuel Thraigum3293   2023-03-28 15:43  

#5   ^ Not a good way to get home safely.
Posted by: Abu Uluque   2023-03-28 13:36  

#4  
Posted by: Abu Uluque   2023-03-28 13:14  

#3  #2 ...how to get home safely

Conventional wisdom is that there'd be no "home" left to get back to.
Posted by: Mercutio 2023-03-28 09:56


Mercutio,

When I left SAC in '84, Miss Buffy was at the height of her powers, but there was a price.

We had just stood up with the Air Launched Cruise Missile and swapped out our old gravity bombs for new and much lighter B-61s. A full loadout was 12 ALCM, 4 B-61, and 8 AGM-69 SRAM (picture a hyper accurate Mach 4 dart). One nickname for this loadout was The Doomsday Machine, and that wasn't far off: ONE Buff in that rig could (at the time) knock the USSR or China right out of the 20th century for a while and any other nation on Earth would simply cease to function as a coherent entity.

But, that price: in order to get off the ground at all with that load, they could not take off with a full load of fuel - it was expected that they would catch tankers soon after takeoff and press on. However, even if they did and managed to get every single drop into the tanks they could, Miss Buffy was stretched to her absolute limits of range and capacity.

The criteria was tanks empty over the last target.

Mike
Posted by: MikeKozlowski   2023-03-28 12:25  

#2  ...how to get home safely

Conventional wisdom is that there'd be no "home" left to get back to.
Posted by: Mercutio   2023-03-28 09:56  

#1  The video walked through training exercises for bomber crews on board B-52. The crew would be informed of a mission but wouldn't know if it was a real quest or not until they reached their target

Male bovine scatalogical material.

Mike
Posted by: MikeKozlowski   2023-03-28 06:32  

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