Carrying a Nuke to Sevastopol: One Pilot, One Engine, and One Plutonium Bomb
By Daniel Ford
5/5
()
About this ebook
This story began as a study of lofting or tossing nuclear weapons, known as"LABs," for Low Altitude Bombing system. I became fascinated with the notion of using the prop-driven Skyraider for this purpose, and the story evolved into an account of what it would have been like to drive this 1940s aircraft to Sevastopol on the first day of the Third World War. "Crazy days," as one pilot called the notion. The article was published in Foundation magazine of the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola in its Fall 1999 issue, and is somewhat expanded here. I have included my email correspondents with the men who call themselves the "Spadguys," for the benefit of those who'd like to delve deeper into the sometimes desperate measures that were taken during the Cold War years. The book's frontispiece shows the pretty Pokrovsky cathedral in the center of Sevastopol, which I have chosen as the IP or Initial Point of my mythical sortie. From its spire, all other calculations would be based. Crazy days, indeed! -- Daniel Ford
Daniel Ford
Daniel Ford has spent a lifetime reading and writing about the wars of the past hundred years, from the Irish rebellion of 1916 to the counter-guerrilla operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is best known for his history of the American Volunteer Group--the 'Flying Tigers' of the Second World War--and his Vietnam novel that was filmed as Go Tell the Spartans, starring Burt Lancaster. Most recently, he has turned to the invasion of Poland in 1939 by Germany and Soviet Russia. Most of his books and many shorter pieces are available in digital editions He lives and works in New Hampshire.
Read more from Daniel Ford
A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America's War on Terror Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Your 12 Week Guide to Swimming: From Your Armchair to a 400 Metre Swim in 12 Weeks Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsYour 12 Week Guide to the Gym: From Your Armchair to a Complete Body Workout in 12 Weeks Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFlying Tigers: Claire Chennault and his American Volunteers, 1941-1942 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Rising Sun Over Burma: Flying Tigers and Wild Eagles, 1941-1942 - How Japan Remembers the Battle Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsYour 12 Week Guide to Running: From Your Armchair to a 5 Km Race in 12 Weeks Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings100 Hawks for China Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Sorry Saga of the Brewster Buffalo: A Flying Coffin to the U.S. Marines, but a Pearl to the Finns Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When Sun-tzu Met Clausewitz: the OODA Loop and the Invasion of Iraq Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Only War We've Got Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Glen Edwards: The Diary of a Bomber Pilot, From the Invasion of North Africa to His Death in the Flying Wing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings100 Fair Pilots: The Men Who Became the Flying Tigers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRemains: A Story of the Flying Tigers, Who Won Immortality Defending Burma and China from Japanese Invasion Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers, 1941-1942 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCowboy: The Interpreter Who Became a Soldier, a Warlord, and One More Casualty of Our War in Vietnam Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTaildragger Tales: My Late-Blooming Romance with a Piper Cub and Her Younger Sisters Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Tales of the Flying Tigers: Five Books about the American Volunteer Group, Mercenary Heroes of Burma and China Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhen I Am Going: Growing Up In Ireland and Coming to America, 1901-1927 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMichael's War: A Story of the Irish Republican Army, 1916-1923 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Looking Back From Ninety: The Depression, the War, and the Good Life That Followed Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Country Northward: A Hiker's Journal Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNow Comes Theodora Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLucky the Ladybug Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPoland's Daughter: How I Met Basia, Hitchhiked to Italy, and Learned About Love, War, and Exile Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDon't Touch the Nuts: And Other Unwritten Rules of the British Pub Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Carrying a Nuke to Sevastopol
Related ebooks
Milk Run: A Gunner's Tale Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Race for Hitler's X-Planes: Britain's 1945 Mission to Capture Secret Luftwaffe Technology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe V-Weapons: Then and Now Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLaunch Pad UK: Britain and the Cuban Missile Crisis Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings1955: VAH-7 Secret Navy Atom Bomber Squadron Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Patricia Lynn Project: Vietnam War, the Early Years of Air Intelligence Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDestroyer Down: An Account of HM Destroyer Losses, 1939–1945 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5British Airships, Past, Present, and Future Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Dams Raid Through The Lens Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn Chariots Of Iron Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vs-931 Antisubmarine Squadron Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5World War 2 In Review No. 73: Air Power Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Royal Naval Air Service in the First World War: Aircraft and Events as Recorded in Official Documents Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Wellington Bomber Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJack Davenport: Beaufighter Leader Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Story Of The Lafayette Escadrille Told By Its Commander Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Distant Thunder: Helicopter Pilot's Letters from War in Iraq and Afghanistan Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Dutch Caper Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe American bomb in Britain: US Air Forces' strategic presence, 1946–64 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsKingsnorth Airship Station: In Defence of the Nation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSolo into the Rising Sun: The Dangerous Missions of a U.S. Navy Bomber Squadron in World War II Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Whispering Death Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOahu's Narrow-Gauge Navy Rail Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsConvoy Commodore Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5RAF Fighter Pilots Over Burma Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Mosquito in the USAAF: De Havilland’s Wooden Wonder in American Service Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJourney of the Giants Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPortrait of a Bomber Pilot Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Naval Air Station Wildwood Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Terror from the Sky: The Doodlebug War Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5
Modern History For You
Voices from Chernobyl Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Fifties Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Night to Remember: The Sinking of the Titanic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The God Delusion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/577 Days of February: Living and Dying in Ukraine, Told by the Nation’s Own Journalists Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/518 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Outlaw Platoon: Heroes, Renegades, Infidels, and the Brotherhood of War in Afghanistan Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devil's Notebook Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5World War 1: A History From Beginning to End Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All But My Life: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Little Red Book Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related categories
Reviews for Carrying a Nuke to Sevastopol
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love the airplane and the stories. These guys were (and still are) the BEST! All the fun, and with a box lunch!
Book preview
Carrying a Nuke to Sevastopol - Daniel Ford
Note from the Author
THIS STORY BEGAN as a study of lofting or tossing nuclear weapons, a method that the U.S. military called LABs
for Low Altitude Bombing System. I became fascinated with the notion of using the prop-driven Skyraider for this purpose, and the story evolved into an account of what it would have been like to drive this 1940s aircraft to the Crimea on the first day of the Third World War. (This peninsula – almost an island – was then and still is the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It became part of Ukraine in 1954 but seized again just recently by a newly assertive Moscow.) I don’t know that Sevastopol was on U.S. Navy’s target list, but it almost certainly was. What more suitable destination for a piston-driven aircraft that came off the drawing board in 1945?
Crazy days,
as one pilot called the notion. The article was published in Foundation magazine of the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola in its Fall 1999 issue, and is somewhat expanded here. I have included my email correspondence with the men who call themselves the Spadguys,
for the benefit of those who’d like to delve deeper into the sometimes desperate measures that were taken during the Cold War years.
The frontispiece shows Pokrovsky cathedral in the center of Sevastopol, which I have chosen as the IP or Initial Point of my mythical sortie. From its spire, all other calculations would be based. Crazy days, indeed! – Daniel Ford, Durham, New Hampshire, May 2014
Nuclear-capable SkyraidersThese AD-6 Skyraiders of Navy Attack Squadron 42 were capable of carrying a plutonium bomb with a ‘yield’ of 10,000 to 70,000 thousand tons of TNT
‘I Wasn’t Afraid of Anything’
Like I said, I was a 24-year-old Marine lieutenant at the time, and I wasn’t afraid of anything
– Jay Velie, Dallas, Texas
What should you be afraid of? Well, try this on for size:
You're Breakeven Four Zero One – one man, one engine, and one plutonium bomb. The year is 1957, the month February, the hour 0200. You're sitting on your parachute in the tidy cockpit of a Douglas AD-6 Skyraider, better known as the Able Dog, checking its systems by the small gooseneck flashlight that hangs from a chain around your neck. A Wright R-3350 – the same engine that powered the mighty B-29 super-bomber of World War II – swings a four-bladed propeller through a circle almost 14 feet in diameter. Just behind the whirling blades, there hangs a slenderized version of the Fat Man atomic bomb that on August 9, 1945, laid waste to Nagasaki. Its yield
could be anything from ten thousand tons of TNT (half the size of the Hiroshima bomb) to seventy thousand tons, depending on what core it contains.
The MK 7 weighs 1,700 pounds and measures 15 feet long by 30.5 inches in diameter. If you need to return to USS Forrestal with it still on the center-line – tires flat and oleo struts compressed – the nuke will clear the steel flight deck with only six inches to spare. You're sweating beneath your pressure suit, flight suit, survival vest, and inflatable life preserver.
On the carrier-deck angle
to your left, the jet pukes in their A4D Skyhawks are being shot into the night like so many rockets. Breakeven Four Zero One doesn’t rate a catapult. Instead, you circle the flashlight, the flight deck officer gives you the okay, and you push the throttle to the stop. With a bellowing growl, that R-3350 drags you toward a marker that’s invisible until you're moving fast enough to pop the tail up. Then all you can see is the red light that glows on the far end of the flight deck, which first leaps toward you and then disappears beneath the nose. The oleos thump off the end of the deck, and you descend to your cruising altitude. Yes: you drop closer to the water.
World War III has come, and Breakeven Four Zero One is at the pointy end of the spear, heading for Russia at a fuel-thrifty 140 knots (173 miles per hour). You switch from internal fuel to the 300-gallon drop tank beneath the port wing. Then you inflate the rubber doughnut that will cushion your butt, more or less, during the long hours of your flight. Every three minutes, by the red glow of your flashlight, you put a time tick on the chart, closing the distance from the island of Crete to the island of Rhodes, just off the coast of Turkey. Every fifteen minutes, you calculate the fuel you've burned. And you check your altitude! At fifty feet above the water, a moment’s inattention can send your and your aircraft cartwheeling across the waves, a maneuver from which there will be no escape.
In our squadron of 22 pilots, we lost three killed by flying into the ground or water during a 20-month period. I thought this was normal.
– Tom Beard, Port Angeles, Washington
The clock on the instrument panel is set to Zulu – military-speak for Greenwich Mean Time. Here in the eastern Mediterranean, the day is two hours ahead of Greenwich, and by 0300 the sky has softened from black to gray. You turn north, threading between the islands, each more visible than the one before, meanwhile smoking a cigarette from the sleeve pocket of your flight suit. In 1957, smoking is a manly art, and almost every man does it.
At 0312 – right on schedule – the Turkish port of Bodrum appears before you, with its palms and fishing boats and a pretty castle on a point of land. Remembering the Naval aviators who splattered themselves onto the brown cliffs of Turkey, you advance the throttle, pull back on the joystick, and clear the castle at a cautionary 200 feet and 170 knots. Feet dry! You power the canopy open, lose a section of chart into the pines, and unroll the Turkish flight chart from the toilet-paper core that keeps the route organized. Your course lies northeast, threading between the mountains. Legalized flathatting!
At 0407 you leave the town of Usak to starboard, rewarding yourself with an apple from the box lunch supplied by Forrestal's galley. Just after 0500 – full daylight now, on a cloudy spring morning – it's feet wet and 50 feet again, across the Black Sea toward Sevastopol. If flying too low is dangerous, flying too high is even worse, for then the Russian radar will see you coming.
On your right-hand console is the Black Box. You toggle the switch that says INSERT - EXTRACT, whereupon a green light goes out and a yellow light comes on. This tells you that, in the guts of the MK 7 that’s slung from your center-line, a battery-driven screw gear is moving a ten-pound capsule of uranium 235 into a soccer ball of tamper and explosives. When detonated, the explosive compound will squeeze the capsule and cause the U-235 to go critical.
Long minutes later, the yellow light goes out and the red light comes on.