WI: America Fully Converts Its Nuclear Strike Force to Stealth

Greenville

Banned
What if the American military in the time of Ronald Reagan fully made all of its nuclear bombers stealth aircraft like B-2s. How much difference would this make in their survivability in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union?
 
What if the American military in the time of Ronald Reagan fully made all of its nuclear bombers stealth aircraft like B-2s. How much difference would this make in their survivability in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union?
Unlikely to happen, B-2 only flew in 1989 after Reagan was out of office, tech was not quite there yet. That was actually the plan before Reagan, Carter cancelled B-1 and authorized the B-2 that would replace the B-52 eventually, then Reagan restarted the B-1 program to fulfill a campaign promise. Admittedly the B-1B had reduced RCS, but it was not fully stealth

To fully replace the B-52 by Jan-89 one would have to start procurement early, so such a bomber would be fairly primitive vis a vis the B-2 and much easier to detect, plus one would have to do mass procurement so it cannot be a secret

What would really make a difference in survivability would be accelerating the AGM-129 and developing a variant of the AGM-86 that could fit in a B-1 bomb bay, allowing the B-52 greater standoff range, and giving the B-1 some standoff range
 

Archibald

Banned
Hello, stealth is not a magic bullet, you can't apply it to aircrafts in service. As said the B-2 flew in 1989.

Now more F-117s would be feasible, for example instead of F-15E Strike Eagle after 1986 to replace F-111s. But it was a tactical aircraft, not a strategic bomber.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
If you want your nuclear fleet to survive, you need stealth airfields, just as much as stealth aircraft.

We would have dispersed them to one bomber per civilian/military airport. It is really the best one can do. Hopefully if on hot alert and sitting at the end of a runway, they can be airborne before the Russian nukes strike.
 
We would have dispersed them to one bomber per civilian/military airport. It is really the best one can do. Hopefully if on hot alert and sitting at the end of a runway, they can be airborne before the Russian nukes strike.

That's seems prohibitively expensive without offering any advantages over ICBMs or submarines.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
That's seems prohibitively expensive without offering any advantages over ICBMs or submarines.

Yes. It is. In theory, the B-2 would hunt down soviet mobile launchers while our land based ICBM would destroy their nuclear ICBM silos. But if one thinks about flight time of the B-2, it is clear that it can only be used in a first strike scenario where we achieve complete surprise. In reality, our SSBN were our MAD counter deterrent. We should have spent more on subs, less on air force.
 

SsgtC

Banned
The bulk of America's nuclear deterant is stealth. No one has ever successfully tracked an Ohio-class SSBN. Most of which are out to sea almost continually. The B-52s haven't been used in a nuclear strike roll in a long time. They're still capable of it, but only if TSHTF.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
The bulk of America's nuclear deterant is stealth. No one has ever successfully tracked an Ohio-class SSBN. Most of which are out to sea almost continually. The B-52s haven't been used in a nuclear strike roll in a long time. They're still capable of it, but only if TSHTF.

B-52 were tasked in a nuclear role in the soviet days.
 
I thought any war between the United States and the USSR involving an exchange of ICBMs was inherently unwinnable by either side, especially by the time frame stealth bombers come into existence.
 
I thought any war between the United States and the USSR involving an exchange of ICBMs was inherently unwinnable by either side, especially by the time frame stealth bombers come into existence.

It's theoretically possible that enough mechanical failures might occur that one side, the other, or both staffers out of the exchange merely horrendously damaged. There's actually a nightmare scenario which is something of the inverse of the much better know "mutual annihilation" result which is referred to as "the brokenback war" concept, where both sides come out with tens/hundreds of millions dead and large portions of their war making capacity in ashes but still have enough to continue fighting and refuse to quit.
 
where both sides come out with tens/hundreds of millions dead and large portions of their war making capacity in ashes but still have enough to continue fighting and refuse to quit.
Even if this did happen, what could the US/USSR plausibly do to each other with their respective countries/allies nuked to Hell?
 
Even if this did happen, what could the US/USSR plausibly do to each other with their respective countries/allies nuked to Hell?

Continue waging conventional war with whatever surviving remnants of their armies they can contact while trying to scrounge up the resources to build a new nuclear arsenal to deliver the knock-out blow.
 
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