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."

Comments

Suicide bombers

[Anarchofascist]

What a cool article about American suicide bombers! I love suicide bombers. There's something so daring, heroic and tragic about them, don't you think?

What a great guy. He sure must have a lot of guts to be prepared to strap himself into a weapon of mass destruction and hurtle himself at the enemy like that, knowing that he was unlikely to come back alive. How dashing! How adventurous!

To bad there aren't enough people like that in the world today, willing to throw their lives away for a cause they believe in.

Yes, I know, there will always be the lefty naysayers who will complain about "thousands of innocent civilians dead" but this is wartime! You have to expect civilians to be killed (and sometimes even targetted) by suicide troops in the struggle for a greater glory.

[Note for our American readers: Please don your sarcasm-glasses, switch on your ironometers and re-read this post]

You're not targeting Sevastopol but the military airfield on the mainland beyond, to take out the MiG-15s that would otherwise intercept the big bombers of the Strategic Air Command.

Ah that's alright then. It's a military target. He's going to kill the soldiers who would try to prevent our boys from murdering millions of civilians.