American ingenuity.
Via Politico:
In 1964, Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Love the Bomb burst into the cerulean with the force of a surface-to-air missile. Considered one of the greatest political satires ever made, the film centers around an unhinged Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC) general, Jack D. Ripper, who sends his wing of Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers to nuke the Soviet Union, and the frantic effort to recall them before they can deliver their thermonuclear payload. Said effort fails. Cue mushroom clouds and the WWII English songbird Vera Lynn singing, “We’ll meet again.”
“Released at the height of the Cold War, not long after the Cuban missile crisis, before the escalation in Vietnam,” Fred Kaplan wrote in the New York Times in 2004, “Dr. Strangelove dared to suggest—with yucks!—that our top generals might be bonkers, and that our well-developed system for preserving the peace was in fact a doomsday machine.”
At the time of the film, the country’s relatively young armada of 700-odd B-52s were the fulcrum of that doomsday machine. SAC kept one third of the fleet on quick reaction ground alert, ready to fly to designated targets within the USSR within 15 minutes. During times of increased tension, as during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a number of other Stratofortresses were on airborne alert, ready to launch an immediate retaliatory blow against the USSR if necessary, like Ripper’s bomber wing in Strangelove.
Fast forward 50 years to the current nuclear stand-off with North Korea. As Kim Jong Un has upped his nuclear game, speculation has swirled that the Pentagon is considering sending some of its B-52s to reprise their Cold War role by placing them back on quick-reaction ground alert, loaded and ready to fly with crews in running range of their aircraft.
That order has not been given, U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein emphasized in October, after a tour he conducted of his Barksdale Air Force Base fleet of BUFFs (short for Big Ugly Fat Fellas or Big Ugly Fat Fuckers, depending on your French), as the lumbering swept-wing aircraft are known. The Air Force did note that the bases’ alert facility was being updated in case the order does come down from Air Force Global Strike Command.
Meanwhile, in a conspicuous show of force seemingly designed to irk the North Korean leader, last week the Air Force deployed six nuclear-capable B-52Hs to Andersen Air Base in Guam—the same base from which earlier incarnation BUFFs flew bombing missions against North Vietnam 50 years ago. According to the Air Force, the surprise move was part of the U.S. military’s effort to maintain “a continuous bomber presence in the Pacific.” At the same time, other B-52Hs based in Qatar armed with conventional laser-guided bombs are flying troop control missions against the Taliban in Afghanistan.