Slashdot Mirror
Nuke-Lobbing
SlideGuitar writes "The following is a fascinating article about how the Navy in the 1950s, wanting to assure that it had a carrier based nuclear force, used A1 Skyraider (single engine propellor driven aircraft) to lob nuclear bombs using a manuever called the "goofy loop" (read the article.) The goofy loop put about seven miles between them and a Mark 7 nuclear device at detonation. The pilots knew that (1) they couldn't get far enough away to survive, and (2) if they did survive there probably wouldn't be a carrier to go back to anyway. There are lots of emails from pilots who did the manuever and what they thought about the whole business."
Well, the guys who actually did it said that their bombs normally fell within 300ft of their targets.
Airspeed indicators can be pretty accurate.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You've got the cart before the horse. This maneuver was never considered for the small nukes, because they didn't exist. And why were the nukes so big way back then? Two reasons. It was harder to make small nukes. The backpack nuke was really hard to make compared to a multi-megaton monster. The other reason is that with inaccurate delivery systems you need big nukes to destroy a target if you miss it by 3 or 4 miles.
As the accuracy of missile systems crept up, the size of the nuke required went down. Now, we can drop a conventional bomb or 4 right through a specific window, so there's hardly any targets that cannot be destroyed by a conventional bomb.
Nukes are basically obsolete as battlefield weapons.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
When the Soviets got the Bomb, of course, the Cold War started in earnest, and so plans had to be drawn up to fight the most colossal and devastating war in human history (hot on the heels of that previous most colossal and devastating war in human history where the Soviet happened to be our allies). It was of course feared that in this upcoming war, the Soviets would have a tremendous advantage in conventional forces, and waves of Soviet tanks would roll across Europe. Thus, our rapidly growing stockpile of atomic bombs would become an important asset. The major question was how these weapons would be delivered. The Air Force of course responded by building a fleet of long range strategic bombers, and the Navy a fleet of submarines that could launch nuclear missiles; these measures, however, took years to set up, leading to a variety of interesting stopgap measures. This includes the lovely "idiot loop" maneuver explained here of course, as well as the Army's approaches, which included a 280mm cannon that fired atomic artillery shells, and what is perhaps the most unbelievable weapon in military history (and that includes the insane ideas the Nazis had at the end of WWII like the Me-162), the Davy Crockett. Why yes, that is a nuclear warhead being fired out of a recoilless rifle barrel.
Like I said, these were stopgap measures, born out of desperation. Of course, this period pretty much entered its twilight with the development of the thermonuclear "Super" device, and was utterly swept away with the advent of the ICBM and SLBM to carry it. It became clear that there was no longer any place for tactics on a nuclear battlefield- with thousands of ballistic missiles on each side, most of civilization would be vapor before conventional troops got loaded into the transport plane. Also, the long term effects of radiation were becoming known- how does the traditional idea of territorial control work if in order to gain territory, you have to nuke it? Anyway, some of the ideas that came up in this short period were pretty crazy, but they're pretty much par for the course in military history- whenever a new technology hits the battlefield, strategists go nuts trying to either combat against it, or work it into their plans- compare this period in history, where a weapon of incredible power threatened to make conventional forces obsolete, to a period like the introduction of firearms to the medieval battlefield, or the introduction of the ironclad in naval battles- the old weapons and strategies quickly beome obsolete, and military planners become willing to try absolutely anything to gain the upper hand.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
I'd like to point out that the Davy Crockett (Best. Weapon. Ever.) which is referenced in my slightly later post (you beat me by 6 minutes) does not fire a 40 kiloton nuclear warhead, it fires a roughly 40 ton nuclear warhead, a difference of three orders of magnitude. The Hiroshima device is estimated at about 15 kilotons; these are about 0.04 kilotons. These are the smallest nuclear warheads ever created, with an explosive power between 2-4 times that of the ANFO bomb that was used to destroy the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The equivalent of 40 tons of TNT is still enough to cause a gigantic explosion, of course, and gives you some sort of idea of the incredible devastation caused by a strategic thermonuclear warhead in the megaton range.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Actually, the nuclear weapons currently held by the USA, Russia, and their nuclear buddies are typically of about 100 kT yield. This is much smaller than those of the 1960s. Furthermore, the US is destroying the last 50 MX missiles, which are the most technologically advanced ICBMs ever built.
But these are mere facts, and so are unimportant in the discourse of this enlightened age.
That sounds like an awefully small yeild. I recall reading somewhere that it was the lowest possible yield they could acchive, but I've not been able to find that page again. I did however find this (curtesy of this page);
Back in the 1960s, American designers put together probably the coolest - yet also most suicidal - battlefield weapon ever built. It was a nuclear bazooka, capable of being operated by a pair of soldiers, and intended to be unleashed against Soviet battalions as they headed for Worthing-on-Sea.
The bazooka was given the patriotic codename 'Davy Crockett', presumably to encourage its operators to risk using it. Basically a scaled-up rifle grenade launcher which could either be hand-carried or mounted on a jeep, the initial Davy Crockett model had a maximum range of only two kilometres, later doubled to four. The minimum range was a suicidal 400 metres.
The tripod-mounted launcher fired a W-54 plutonium implosion bomb, the smallest nuclear weapon ever fielded by US forces. The egg-shaped atomic bomb weighed a portable 25 kilograms and had a selectable yield of either 10 or 20 tonnes. In blast terms that makes it only four times as powerful as the 1995 Oklahoma bombing device, but its wider radiation effects would inflict considerable fatalities. The Davy Crockett warhead had a timer fuse to be primed by its operators, who would have had to work out the time taken to reach its target.
One early firing of the Davy Crockett at the Nevada Test Site was witnessed by US Attorney General Robert Kennedy. From 1961 onwards 400 bazooka warheads were manufactured and deployed. However non-nuclear test firings of the Davy Crockett revealed the design had a targeting flaw and it was retired in 1971.
The W-54 bomb had another application, as an Atomic Demolition Munition (ADM). Planted in hidden chambers beneath Germany - to destroy or block access to Warsaw Pact forces - it could be carried on handles by an individual or a team using mounted poles. ADMs were only finally retired from service in 1989.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Uh, no.
The M388 warhead had a selectable yield from 10 to 250 _tons_.
Here's some more info....
Also, take a look at another neat Cold-war toy: The 280mm Atomic Cannon....
Prop planes were hardly the only aircraft that tossed bombs to deploy them. The F-105 Thunderchief, nicknamed the "Thud", was designed to be a fighter/BOMBER delivering nuclear payloads. I was an air force grunt that worked on them in the Viet Nam era and watched a training video showing the aircraft in the strategic (nuclear) mission. It had a fire control computer that was known as the "toss bomb computer" and calculated climb angle, release point, etc. The idea was the same, run in low to the ground at mach 1.2 (the aircraft had a very low radar cross section from the front) and do a half loop and release the bomb in the arc and keep going to roll out back the way you came. Cross your fingers and hold on to your ass. Here is a picture of the delivery.
over-the-shoulder
Its engines had an average life of 10 hours, that's 2-3 missions. They were hard to manufacture at all, let alone in quality and quantity.
It had short range, the jet engines of the day were very inefficient and gobbled fuel like crazy. This would have made their fuel supply problems worse.
All jet engines have slow acceleration, the early ones even more so. An Me-262 in landing pattern was a sitting duck. More sitting ducks = more losses, and at low altitude, fewer survivors.
The allies had jet planes, but since they didn't need them, they didn't push production. If the Me-262 had come out in number in 1943, the allied jet fighters would have been out in even larger number in 1944. The P-80 was a better plane than the Me-262. I think the British one was too. Of course, like all jets, it was short range and couldn't have escorted bombers to Berlin.
Infuriate left and right
Fallout can of course be quite deadly. But these are very large areas you are talking about. When something is spread, it is diluted, and also the most radioactive isotopes will be gone in a matter of days anyway.
This is a fallacy. Allow me to quote from Sakharov's Memoirs (Knopf, 1990), pages 201-202, on the long-term effects of nuclear detonations:
"Bearing in mind that the average humand lifetime is 20,000 days, each roengten of global radiation will reduce this average lifetime by one week! My overall estimate of the number of human victims of a one-megaton detonation was 10,000. Two-thirds of this huge figure was attributed to the radioactive isotope carbon-14, which is formed during both "clean" and "normal" thermonuclear explosions. Carbon-14 has a half life of 5,000 years; its damaging effects thus continue over thousands of years. [...] By 1957, the total power of the nuclear bombs that had been tested around the world added up to nearly fifty megatons. According to my estimates, this would mean 500,000 casualties."
Footnote: "Frank von Hippel of Princeton University has used recent UN surveys of population exposures to atmosperic fallout and the health effects of ionizing radiation to obtain an estimate of 1,000 to 25,000 cancers and genetic disorders per megaton, which is consistent with Sakharov's earlier estimate"
Sakarov's article on the long term effects of atmospheric testing was instrumental in motivating the USSR and the US toward the landmark Atmospheric Testing Ban Treaty.
40-50 bombs, even of megaton size, do not produce enough fallout to render three large states uninhabitable
Only if you're speaking only of 'normal' thermonuclear or purely fissile weapons.
Remember back around 9/11 all the talk of 'dirty bombs'? This is what your parent is talking about. 40-50 high-yeild dirty bombs would create a lot of radioactive fallout, as the radioactive elements inside would not be destroyed by fission, but vaporized and spread over a large area by a conventional explosion.
"The official reasons given (9/11, WMD, "he gassed his own people", bringing democracy to the nations in the region, etc.) either make no logical sense, are obvious lies, or are so outlandish that it's clear nobody in the administration takes them seriously."
Let's put it this way: If the fundamental government in Iraq were changed to a democratic model for other Arabs to follow, we woudln't have the totalitarian regimes in place that breed the kind of terrorism we saw 9/11/01 in the first place.
"It has something to do with Israel."
So we're attacking Iraq instead of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, etc?
"It has something to do with oil."
So we attacked Iraq instead of Venezuela, Mexico, etc?
"We want to invade a country so we can gain access to its oil fields."
Between how little oil we've been buying from Iraq and the incredibly long distance it has to be shipped from, going after Iraq simply for it's oil is counter-productive. France and Russia need Iraqi oil far more than we do.
And again, if we wanted access to OPEC oil, there's still Venezuela, where most of our foreign oil comes from. Hell, we could have used their recent strike as a precedent.
Why wouldn't the manuver be survivable? The various models of the B61 had adjustable (Dial-a-Yield).
mod 3: 0.3 1.5 60 170 kilotons
mod 4: 0.3 1.5 10 45 kilotons
mod 7: 10 - 340 kilotons
mod 10: 0.3 5 10 80 kilotons
mod 11: 0.3 - 340 kilotons
For a 20 kiloton weapon, severe damage to wood frame houses goes to about 1.4 miles from ground zero. And that distance increases very roughly as the cube root of the yield...for a monster 20 MEGATON bomb, it's 16 miles.
So if you're delivering a 80 kiloton yield, you'd want to be maybe more than 2.5 miles away, which I would hope your F-111 could do in a short time.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Not England.
Yes, but the CEP will also be a function of when they start the pull-up and how accurately they fly the vector from the IP to the target. Plenty of skill and judgement are still required.
So it's not as easy as, say, pointing a laser and dropping a Paveway.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!