No competent military planner would have taken this seriously. If this was good planning, why didn't it get built?Īnswer, it was an idiot idea, and quickly recognized as such. A "city killer" is generally at least 25 megatons) In reality, I doubt the Soviet bombers would bunch up like that. And rendering the surface under ground zero a radioactive wasteland. What do you do about incoming hordes of Soviet nuclear bombers, coming to wipe out the USA? Why, send out a single plane with a one megaton city-killer air to air missile, to vaporize the entire swarm in one go. Oh, heck, what am I saying? It's North Bay.Īpparently this is what passes for good military planning back in 1956. Those things look like (many) accidents waiting to happen, and who wants to be the person who tells John Diefenbaker that "we lost North Bay." Tundra might not even have been the issue. That said, the Canadian government was not impressed. Every one of those shot down is a million North Americans saved. Using one 1(2 -I doubt they had a clear idea of the yield before the test burst) megaton bomb to shoot down a single bomber might seem like overkill, but not if said bomber was itself carrying a MT yield weapon. So the only viable alternative is an area-effect weapon. The bomb was intended to fight waves of incoming bombers, yes but in the sense that the small number of available fighters would almost certainly not get a good interception envelope on a detected aircraft. Distances were great, radar coverage poor, and the interception envelope terrible. Re: Sky Scorcher 1 megaton air-to-air missile (1956) Giving them a nuclear warhead, made it very likely that an interceptor 'could' bring down whatever bomber they detected. And the technology for making reliably targetable air to air missiles simply was not there yet. Allowing even one to get through would be unthinkable.
What was their alternative? Those bombers if it came down to a shooting war, HAD to be stopped. Yes, there would however be a good chance the Soviets would be trying to fly in under the radar (hugging the ground, which would slow them down, giving their opponents more time to find them and intercept, so six of one, half a dozen of the other), so. You certainly wouldn't want to be beneath it when it went off, but it's effect on the ground would have been transitory. A one megaton blast happening at a height of six or seven miles would not turn the area below into a radioactive wasteland.
Secondly, everyone seems to universally overestimate the lethality of these weapons. There were no human beings or settled lands beneath where the warhead would have detonated. Those bombers would have been intercepted over the high arctic or tundra.
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