found in 
Washington garage 
. The AIR-2 Genie 
The AIR-2 Genie was an unguided air to air nuclear missile. It was developed early in the cold war prior to ICBM's and guided air to air missiles. By the early 50's, the Soviets had reversed engineered the B-29 Superfortress into the TU-4 which could theoretically bomb the United States in a one way mission. The bomber's routes would take them over the Arctic Circle.
An air to air guided missile sounds like something Curtis LeMay would come up with in a fever dream. However, the mission profile makes sense in the context of its time. The Genie was designed to be fired into bomber formations, as that was the only delivery mechanism at the time. The 1.5kT warhead would be detonated at the cruising altitude ~33,000 feet. The missile didn't need to be guided since the blast radius would take out the bomber formation over the uninhabited Arctic Circle. It was never intended to be fired over civilian population center and the Air Force was keen to show that it was ""harmless"" to people on the ground.
Curtis "Bomb's Away!" LeMay
To demonstrate , during the Plumbob John test, five Air Force personnel stood below the blast.
The AIR-2 Genie was deployed to the Royal Canadian Air Force in a Dual Key arrangement. This ment that the Leafs would deploy the weapon, but the Burgers had to give the order. The Genie was obsolete by the mid 60's when guided missile technology improved and ICBM's became the main delivery systems.
Titan 2 ICBM at the Titan Missile Museum
I got to see one in person when I went to the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, AZ. Well worth it if you're in the area.
Inert AIR-2 Genie at the Pima Air and Space Museum
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The Genie was a really cool design. Probably completely impractical but they literally thought "what if we just detonated a nuke in their bomber formation" and turned it into an actual real life weapon lmao.
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I'm currently listening to an audiobook about the development of nuclear strategy. They talk about it briefly. It was more of an "Oh frick the reds have the bomb and can deliver!" deterrent weapon. That was the thought process, and apparently it worked for what they needed it for.
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It's okay
It's no Project Orion or Project Pluto
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Just an unshielded nuclear reactor on a cruise missile spewing radiation in its wake. No biggie.
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Russia appears to be developing something very similar in current year and they've already had a fatal testing accident with it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyonoksa_radiation_accident
Current hyperfixation:
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A modified Navajo missile -- test article for an XK-PLUTO payload -- dives away from a carrier plane. Unlike the real thing, this one carries no hydrogen bombs, no direct-cycle fission ramjet to bring retaliatory destruction to the enemy. Travelling at Mach 3 the XK-PLUTO will overfly enemy territory, dropping megaton-range bombs until, its payload exhausted, it seeks out and circles a final enemy. Once over the target it will eject its reactor core and rain molten plutonium on the heads of the enemy. XK-PLUTO is a total weapon: every aspect of its design, from the shockwave it creates as it hurtles along at treetop height to the structure of its atomic reactor, is designed to inflict damage.
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It's one of the only potential solutions to the threat of a nuclear bomber fleet. There's just not really anything else that could realistically stop it at the time.
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The Nike Sprint is maybe my favorite cold war defensive weapon.
A missile designed to intercept icbms in their terminal stage by accelerating so fast the case of the warhead begins to glow white hot. Mega cool.
Another one that fascinates me is Brilliant Pebbles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles?wprov=sfla1
It was the final iteration of SDI (which was silly for the time, but developed novel concepts for how to create a shield against nuclear weapons. The really interesting part is why it failed- the primary concerns were cost of orbiting small satellite constellations and the cost of long range air-air missiles with seeker heads sensitive enough to perform interceptions at hundreds of miles- both of which are solved problems by now.
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zoz
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zle
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zozzle
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So they didn't find an actual warhead in some guy's garage, just the rocket that carries it. I've always wondered if someday someone will find an actual warhead in civilian storage. Plenty are unaccounted for, but mostly at the bottom of the ocean or at the bottom of a swamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash
1.5 kt is a very low payload for a nuke with a blast radius of maybe a kilometer or two, but I guess it doesn't take much to knock a plane out of the air
Current hyperfixation:
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There's probably some appalachian hillbilly using it as a heat source to run his still in the backcountry.
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Here's the quick rundown
on the plane designed to carry it
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My Honda civic could carry a nuclear warhead
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That's what's wild, a tiny package can cause that much deviation. The warhead in the Titan 2 is about the size of a Honda Civic lol
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Wartechcels are the absolute worst
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leave that place it isn't worth it
a lot of them are the alt-right mirror images of our tankie edgelord teens, and a lot of people there are broken, toxic people and their parasites who exploit and humiliate them for sociopathic fun
just a really bad community all around
Snapshots:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
AIR-2 Genie:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
TU-4:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
Curtis LeMay:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
Plumbob John test:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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Yeah it's really cool. Gives you a sense of how insane nuclear war is.
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The 1950s conception is nuclear war is so unimaginably based. High altitude bombers dropping unguided dumb bombs, fighting off interceptors with unguided nuclear rockets, and ground troops deploying nuclear bombs via short range ballistic missiles, 203mm tube artillery, recoilless rifles that can't lob the nuke to minimum safe distance and nuclear landmines with chicken coops in them to keep the nukes warm. Insanely cool
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That and the mechanical aspect of it. Like the dual keys used are just far enough that it takes two people. When I was there I bought a piece of targeting tape as a souvenir.
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zoz
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zle
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zozzle
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I always just thought what it would've been like for those people if they got the order to launch-- The US is at an end but you're going to make sure no one anywhere survives, and then you slowly die in your bunker.
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I went to a conference that was hosted at an old Titan II site that was in the early stages of being restored. It had been sealed since the 80s when some drunk teen fell down one of the silos and died.
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Are you in some aerospace field or was it just hosted there for the coolness factor lol
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It was a computer/maker thing, so combo between coolness and remote location where you can do things like fire off lasers big enough that you have to let the glowies know you're gonna do it.
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JEW SPACE LASERS
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