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T.E. Bell 17:41, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
What purpose, exactly, would an air-to-air nuclear weapon serve? Surely no aircraft has ever been built that was so large and well-armored that it would a nuke would be required to take it down? -- Jfruh ( talk) 02:36, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
BilCat is correct. These weapons were not accurate enough to target individual aircraft, and were designed to explode in the midst of a formation of bombers flying at high altitude, with the fireball and overpressure destroying or damaging a number of aircraft at once. That was even true of the radar-guided AIM-26 in its nuclear version. Of course, all this assumed that the enemy would oblige by approaching in a tight formation at high altitude. US nuclear strike aircraft crews were trained to approach their targets at low-level and singly, or in twos at most. Not in large formations. I leave it to someone else to determine whether this is relevant to the entry for the AIM-26. [1] Mel SharkskinT.E. Bell 17:41, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
References
![]() | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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T.E. Bell 17:41, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
What purpose, exactly, would an air-to-air nuclear weapon serve? Surely no aircraft has ever been built that was so large and well-armored that it would a nuke would be required to take it down? -- Jfruh ( talk) 02:36, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
BilCat is correct. These weapons were not accurate enough to target individual aircraft, and were designed to explode in the midst of a formation of bombers flying at high altitude, with the fireball and overpressure destroying or damaging a number of aircraft at once. That was even true of the radar-guided AIM-26 in its nuclear version. Of course, all this assumed that the enemy would oblige by approaching in a tight formation at high altitude. US nuclear strike aircraft crews were trained to approach their targets at low-level and singly, or in twos at most. Not in large formations. I leave it to someone else to determine whether this is relevant to the entry for the AIM-26. [1] Mel SharkskinT.E. Bell 17:41, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
References