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This thread is awesome and everyone posting all the great info here is awesome. Voted 5 and bookmarked. Thank you very much, iyaayas01!iyaayas01 posted:[...] this could turn into a whole post in and of itself (Launch on Warning, first strike policy, no first use policy, depressed trajectory SLBM launches, C4ISTAR, x ray pin down, decapitating strikes, Dead Hand, Emergency Rocket Communication System, Airborne Launch Control System...I could go on). Anyway, if there is interest, I could do a post on the various type of nuclear war strategies and tactics. Please do that, it would be awesome! Any and all of the topics you mentioned are very, very interesting to me. Cyrano4747 posted:Is anyone interested on a writeup of the flying-wing dead end in cold war aviation? The YB-49 and weird poo poo like that which partially fed into the eventual B2 program? Me! Me! Me! Seriously, this thread.  Oh, and to contribute at least something: The Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program was aimed at developing methods for nuclear-propelled aircraft. The Pluto (doomsday machine to the max!) has been mentioned here already, but an actual flying (experimental) design was the NB-36H, a modified Convair B-36. It contained a 1MW reactor and a four-ton (!) lead shield between that reactor and the crew compartment. The following photo shows some of the modifications to the B-36 airframe, large intake/exhaust openings at the back of the fuselage (the reactor was in the aft bomb bay).  Click here for the full 1875x1500 image. (And yes, that teeny tiny plane next to flying ray-machine is a B-29, which delivered the first nuclear bombs. Also note big grim radioactivity sign on the vertical stabilizer.) Here is a photo of the front section, which was modified from the regular B-36 to house the 30cm (1 foot) thick windshield made of leaded-glass.  Click here for the full 1800x1185 image. During the 47 test flights the NB-36H conducted between 1955 and 1957, the reactor never powered any aircraft systems (for example, the engines) but was mainly used to test shielding systems and see how (or, more basically, IF) such a thing would work. However, the program that started (including forerunners, etc.) in 1946 as NEPA (Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft) was finally abandoned in 1961, before the proposed Convair X-6, that was to use nuclear propulsion, was built. Why do this, you ask? Well, the idea behind a flying nuclear reactor emitting death at a rate of many Becquerel was that of a flying submarine (which were not as highly-developed when the idea was first more or less seriously considered). A nuclear-powered aircraft would have been able to stay aloft for many weeks and not be constrained by range/airbase availability, etc. The SAC could have had their own fleet of (very) low-orbit megaton-delivery boys, who could have loitered far away from their targets, thus not be bothered by pesky interceptors, though still capable of hitting anything, everywhere. So even if Washington, D.C. had been reduced to cinder many hours ago, they would have been able to conduct a nuclear response. Nuclear-powered airfract: Is there anything they cannot do?   
Ridgewell fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Dec 19, 2010 |
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Dec 19, 2010 02:55
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iyaayas01 posted:And there were only a few models of the F-86 that were modified to carry tactical nuclear weapons...the F-100 Super Sabre, on the other hand... iyaayas01 posted:As an interesting side note, the picture of the F-106 at the very top of this post is of one launching an unguided MB-2 Genie air to air rocket...that was armed with a low kiloton yield nuclear warhead. The F-89 was also capable of carrying the same rocket, while both the F-102 and the F-106 were able to employ the guided subkiloton nuclear armed AIM-26 Falcon (a development of the AIM-4 I mentioned earlier). In the cases of the F-102 and F-106 (both of which were flown by a single pilot without a backseat radar operator), arming these aircraft with nuclear weapons was the only time during the entire Cold War when the two man concept was ignored when dealing with nuclear weapons. What's the deal with that?
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Dec 29, 2010 02:40
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McNally posted:Interceptors armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles would probably have a greater latitude to fire their weapons (thus the abandoning of the two-man concept) due to the nature of their mission. Aircraft carrying nuclear weapons as part of a strike wouldn't be authorized to launch without the highest authority and would have only launched if the balloon went up. I was not very clear what I meant in my previous post, sorry. I am not disputing that the two-man rule was ever abandoned (I simply don't know if/when it was). I felt there is a discrepancy betweens iyaayas01's most recent post and his OP. In the OP, he describes the F-106 as the only instance where the two-man rule was abandoned, but in his most recent post, he describes other single-seat fighters (earlier than the F-106) as carrying nuclear weapons. This means that one person, the pilot, had ultimate launch authority. My understanding of the two-man rule is that at any stage of ordering the use of nuclear weapons, two people have to be involved (giving the orders (POTUS and SecDef together *), passing them on, and turning the keys/pushing the buttons). This is nicely demonstrated in the opening sequence of WarGames. Of course ICBMs are not a case of "no-man concept", but the order to launch them has to be given by two people (and sometimes even more, as one Launch Control Center had to confirm the order of another, even though two people sat in either). Similarly, a two-seater aircraft would fulfill that requirement, as the pilot and the weapons systems officer could launch a nuclear weapon (of any kind). I found a definition of the two-man rule by the DOE: http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/doctrine/doe/o5610_11/o5610_11c3.htm And here is what Wikipedia has to say on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule (not very much) Flikken posted:I would think it has something to do with the nature of the nuclear mission since the F-106 was firing an Air to Air Missile(probably over uninhabited/friendly territory) and therefore defensive in nature there probably wasn't a need for a national command authority release of the weapon and the pilot could act independently?? I do not think there should (or would) be any difference in the application of the two-man rule for different nuclear weapons. After all, we are still stalking about nuclear weapons, even if it is a sub-kiloton munition. * I am not sure how well the two-man rule works at the top level, since the President has command/control over the Secretary of Defense and thus might order the SecDef to order the use of nuclear weapons together with him. Still, the actual order has to be given by both, the President alone cannot order the use of nuclear weapons.
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Dec 29, 2010 11:12
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iyaayas01 posted:Dredging up an old topic...there was a discussion several pages back about the two man rule and the strike fighters that were cocked on Victor Alert in Western Europe during the Cold War. Specifically, the question revolved around a statement I made regarding nuclear armed interceptors being the only time the two man rule was violated during the Cold War and whether this was true or not given those fighters cocked on Victor Alert. I gave a pretty non-committal answer about the fighters maybe not flying or something.
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May 21, 2011 16:18
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Sunday Punch posted:I could do a big post about Orion like I did for NERVA and Dyna-Soar if you guys are interested, it's a pretty fascinating piece of history.
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Jun 23, 2011 20:03
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baupdeth posted:Hell yes Seconding this!
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Aug 3, 2011 19:00
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SopWATh posted:Go watch Threads. I'd probably get up on the roof and watch the bombs come in rather than stick around for the aftermath. I followed that advice today and watched it on a long train ride. Holy poo poo this was intense. It's a good movie, so I'm seconding this, too!
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Aug 22, 2011 00:58
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Cyrano4747 posted:My understanding is that the problem isn't the acceleration, it's the acceleration profile. Way too sharp and sudden. My (limited) understanding of EMALS was that exactly this issue should have been solved by it (vis-a-vis steam catapults). The idea being that the electromagnetic control allows much more control and finesse over the magnitude of power applied as well as how/when that power is applied. This intuitively made sense to me. Does anybody have an article at hand explaining this?
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May 30, 2017 14:55
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