Battle Stations B-52 (2000– ) Online

It's a straightforward description of the evolution of the massive Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, sometimes a little intimate. We see reenactors meeting in a room of a modest hotel in downtown Dayton, Ohio. There is a military man explaining to the Boeing engineers what is needed in a big, fast bomber with great range. The colonel gives them two days to come up with a plan.

The Boeing designers begin hastily putting their data together and whittling a model out of balsa wood. The colonel accepts the plans and he and the half dozen representatives of the Boeing aircraft company shake hands and grin broadly, happy that the contract is now made. At that moment, seeing the joy, I realized that the defense industry was probably the greatest tax-payer jobs program the country has ever known. Without the airplanes, the tanks, and the aircraft carriers, we would all of us be in serious trouble.

The airplane first flew in 1951 and met all the requirements of a Cold War nuclear bomber, though it wasn't easy to control. It was to be the mainstay of the Strategic Air Command throughout the Cold War. There were always a handful of B-52s flying at any given time, in case those on the ground were destroyed. Even if SAC Headquarters in Omaha were demolished, there was a command post headed by a general officer always in the air, ready to take over. The long flights coupled with the heavy sense of responsibility must have been awfully stressful for the five crew members.

The bombs they carried were 1700 times as powerful as the two that had been dropped on Japan, which always raises the question in my mind of -- how powerful does any bomb need to be? That is, wouldn't Moscow or Leningrad or Bucharest be sufficiently incapacitated by a bomb only half that size -- say only 750 times as powerful as Hiroshima's? At any rate, there were backup systems after backup systems, with redundancy built in all over the place, just as language has its redundancies. (Complete this sentence: "The container was hermetically ______.") No strike orders were ever issued, but two accidents occurred in which B-52s carrying nuclear weapons crashed, once in Spain and again in northern Europe, leading to protests from the rest of the world that they didn't care for nuclear-armed airplanes using their air space. Thus: The intercontinental ballistic missile.

The constant flights of B-52s were halted in 1968. Anyone interested in seeing how the system worked can watch two reasonably well-done feature films, the dramatic and somewhat overdone "Fail Safe" and the black comedy, "Dr. Strangelove." In 1965 the airplanes were again put to use bombing enemy positions in Vietnam. It was extremely dangerous work because the B-52 was a massive metal airplane that stood out like a beacon on radar, so it was "a sitting duck" for surface-to-air missiles, as one navigator puts it. A total of 32 B-52s were shot down, mainly over North Vietnam. More recently it's been used in the Middle East. The film claims greater losses but I've used the number from Wikipedia.

What a remarkable airplane, when you get right down to it. A strong airframe that's easily modified. It's been in service for more than half a century and its active life is predicted to be one hundred years.