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."

5 of 365 comments (clear)

  1. The Kilrathi do not coexist! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I'm thinking of a - Wing Commander game? It must've been that; probably Wing Commander III. After the massive cannon ship failed, the only remaining option was to go in on a single fighter and deliver this bomb which shattered the Kilrathi homeworld's tectonic plates, but there was no way to deliver the weapon and escape its blast. Kind of a suicide attack, really.

    I think that was the game. But I could be confusing it with Star Control II.

    Man. Science Fiction games were cool in the early nineties. Immersive. What happened?

    1. Re:The Kilrathi do not coexist! by Kumkwat · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Oh thats what happens at the end, I remember just wasting endless cycles trying to shag the cute pilot and mechanic.

  2. Re:offtopic by Alien+Being · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    "drop the USA vs. Them simplicity."

    Right. It's USA+England vs. them.

  3. Re:Damn, that's harsh... by RadioTV · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Owww... he looks like a monkey, so that's a pretty serious slam. :)

    You aren't the only one that thinks he looks like a monkey.

    Bush or Chimp

    --
    I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
  4. Re:offtopic by abirdman · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Let's just call it what it is... a good ol' Texas-sized lynching. I don't believe a lot of strategic, global thinking went into it-- there was a bad guy, and a bunch of people with weapons willing to follow their leader and dispense the justice the rest of the world was too slow to mete out. It appears to have been a successful lynching, too. That's why no one is too concerned that the WMD's haven't turned up.

    --
    Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.