Quote:
Originally Posted by shooting4life
The b52's constantly fly in a loop around the Atlantic and pacific oceans with nuclear weapons, it is another layer of first/quick strike abilities along with subs and icbm's.
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The classic Failsafe operations of SAC when it was flying for Curtis LeMay and Shorty Powers ended in the late 1960s. It was to costly, considered unsafe since several well publicized accidents with nuclear armed B-52s and B-47s occured (one almost put a H bomb on Goldsboro NC a bomb were all but one interlock were triggered by the crash if it had gone off a multimegaton thermonuclear explosion would have happened ) and was wearing out the planes too quickly. It was replaced by what was called ready alert on the runways where a handful of B-52s at the bases would be fueled and armed. In times of crisis the B-52 crews did their shifts sitting at their combat stations in the plane ready to take off the instant the order was given another thing done as a part of redy alert was planes were dispersed to other airfields such as those at decommissioned SAC bases. The ready alert also applied to tankers, escourt fighters and AWACS planes that might be part of the SIOP.
Also by the late 1960s the USA was begining to deploy its 3rd generatinon MIRVed ICBM (Minuetman 30 and SLBMs (Posidon Mark 2) which greatly increased the number of warheads we could deploy and new technology like Navstar/GPS made them frightening accurate even at intercontinental ranges. Since both missiles were solid fueled had integrated solid state electronic they could be launched from a cold start in 90 sec. It took the Soviets several hours to get their liquid fueled ICBMs launched. So our "quick draw" capability gave us an edge and depending on how steely our nerves were the ablity to pre-emp. At least until Carl Sagan and the TAPPS team at Cornell taught us how foolish this would have been.
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