OH, THAT'S WHERE I PUT MY NUCLEAR WARHEAD!
BBC: Inert nuclear missile found in US man's garage
...the device is "in fact a Douglas AIR-2 Genie (previous designation MB-1), an unguided air-to-air rocket that is designed to carry a 1.5 kt W25 nuclear warhead".... The man told police that the rocket belonged to a neighbour who had died, and was originally purchased from an estate sale.
@ai6yr "air-to-air"? They were going to use a nuke for dogfighting?!
@peterdrake Then again, look up "Project Plowshares" 😬
Not one nuke against one aircraft, but against a whole formation of incoming bombers.
(Helps if you put on your 1950s defense contractor hat, the one embroidered to say "put a nuke on it".)
From Wikipedia
"The interception of Soviet strategic bombers was a major military preoccupation of the late 1940s and 1950s. The revelation in 1947 that the Soviet Union had produced a reverse-engineered copy of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, which could reach the continental United States in a one-way attack, followed by the Soviets developing their own atomic bomb in 1949, produced considerable anxiety.
The World War II-age fighter armament of machine guns and cannon were inadequate to stop attacks by massed formations of high-speed bombers. Firing large volleys of unguided rockets into bomber formations was not much better, and true air-to-air missiles were in their infancy. In 1954 Douglas Aircraft began a program to investigate the possibility of a nuclear-armed air-to-air weapon. To ensure simplicity and reliability, the weapon would be unguided, since the large blast radius made precise accuracy unnecessary.
Full-scale development began in 1955, with test firing of inert warhead rockets commencing in early 1956. The final design carried a 1.5-kiloton W25 nuclear warhead and was powered by a Thiokol SR49-TC-1 solid-fuel rocket engine of 162 kN (36,000 lbf) thrust, sufficient to accelerate the rocket to Mach 3.3 during its two-second burn. Total flight time was about 12 seconds, during which time the rocket covered 10 km (6.2 mi). Targeting, arming, and firing of the weapon were coordinated by the launch aircraft's fire-control system. Detonation was by time-delay fuze, although the fuzing mechanism would not arm the warhead until engine burn-out, to give the launch aircraft sufficient time to turn and escape. However, there was no mechanism for disarming the warhead after launch. Lethal radius of the blast was estimated to be about 300 metres (980 ft). Once fired, the Genie's short flight-time and large blast radius made it virtually impossible for a bomber to avoid destruction.
@ai6yr
@peterdrake 😬