If you were a US bomber crew returning home post nuclear war in 1981 where would you land

If you are following orders you will head for a designated recovery spot which could be a NATO country or somewhere in the USA. If all of your alternates are toasted, then try for anyplace in a friendly country that could take your aircraft and refuel you. If everything has gone to crap, a lot depends on where you are. Some of the zones in the USA will be relatively safe, and if you can't land there will be a friendly population when you bail out. If that fails, well try and get south of the equator to someplace that speaks English if you can, which is friendly to the US/NATO. The number of nuclear hits south of the equator will be minimal so fallout issues will be minimal.
If the POD is an American first strike, as the post above you suggested, there might be no place friendly to the USA in the world. And depending on how the situation had escalted with other PODs, the same may apply.

Because even a successful ejection very often results in injuries. With spinal compression fractures the most common.
True, but a returning crew willing ditch the aircraft isn't ejecting during an emergency. The can slow down the plane just above it's minimum speed. And that has to be compared with a potential crash landing if there aren't suitable runways available
 
A B-52 can land on a runway 150 feet wide. It was done at Oshkosh a few years ago. http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/b-52-makes-challenging-landing-to-visit-oshkosh-on-hist-1719206718

That runway was 8000 by 150. Challenging, but possible.

The problem here is that most of the airfields with an 8000 x 150 runway will be either irradiated with fallout or blown to hell. I think the bigger problem for bomber crews is going to be fuel exhaustion long before they get back to the US. That means that the likely airfields they will be looking at will be in Alaska, northern Canada, Iceland and Greenland. Most of those are going to be targets, as the simple fact is that there aren't that many of them and many of them are already air force bases.
 
Except those small airfields are too short and too narrow to allow a B-52 to land. 200'+ wide runways are not common even now and even less so in the early 1980s.

Landing isn't the problem, BUFF is near empty.
Loaded for takeoff, that's where you worry about runway width and how thick the tarmac is so the gear won't punch thru. Anyplace that ever operated 747s would do.
 
Landing isn't the problem, BUFF is near empty.
Loaded for takeoff, that's where you worry about runway width and how thick the tarmac is so the gear won't punch thru. Anyplace that ever operated 747s would do.
Hell My uncle land a B-52 at the Airport in Grand Rapids back in the 1960's when he lost four engines on his B-52 as he was heading to his
MAD point Mutually Assured Destruction.
 
When i look at that map and other maps with possible strike places, i see hardly any in Nevada. Wouldn't Area 51, Tonopah test range and other airforce sites be targeted?
 

BlondieBC

Banned
When i look at that map and other maps with possible strike places, i see hardly any in Nevada. Wouldn't Area 51, Tonopah test range and other airforce sites be targeted?

Why would a test facility be a high priority target? In a nuclear war, the stuff there will never be produced.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
What are the big black splotches in western North Dakota, central Montana, and the intersection of Colorado/Wyoming/Nebraska? Are they oil fields, or uncertain missile silo locations?

And if these areas are important enough to hit that hard in a 2000 warhead scenario, why are there no attacks at all there in the 500 warhead scenario?
500 warheads is insufficient to mount a combined counterforce/infrastructure destruction strike.
 
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