The Supersonic Bone

A Development and Operational History of the B-1 Bomber

Kenneth Katz

• Publisher: Pen and Sword Aviation
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781399014724
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

"This profusely illustrated and thoroughly researched book conveys a wealth of information" about the USAF's B-1 bomber ( Aviation History Magazine).
 
When the B-52 Stratofortress entered operational service with the US Air Force in 1955, work was already underway on defining its successor. The B-70 Valkyrie, a Mach 3 jet bomber, was one option. Although two XB-70A prototypes flew, the B-70 never went into production. Out of the subsequent Advanced Manned Strategic Aircraft program came the B-1A bomber, which flew at high speed and low altitude to evade enemy air defenses. But the B-1A was cancelled in favor of fitting the B-52 with cruise missiles.
 
The B-1, known as the BONE, was revived in 1981 as the improved B-1B to boost American military power and serve as a symbol of American strength at the peak of Cold War tensions. The B-1B entered service in 1986 with several deficiencies. The resolution of most of these issues coincided with the end of the Cold War. After the Cold War, the B-1B lost its primary nuclear mission but remained relevant by transforming into a high-speed, long-range, high-payload delivery platform for conventional precision-guided munitions.
 
The first combat use of the B-1B was in 1998 in Iraq. The BONE has proved a highly effective combat aircraft in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the former Yugoslavia. This extensively illustrated book traces the BONE's long development and operational history in detail.
 
"A must-read book . . . a great reference for historians, pilots, engineers, and even policy makers. Both the writing and photos are excellent." — Air & Space Power History

Chapter 1

The Rise of the American Strategic Bomber

‘The day has passed when armies on the ground or navies on the sea can be the arbiter of a nation’s destiny in war. The main power of defense and the power of initiative against an enemy has passed to the air.’

Brigadier General William L. ‘Billy’ Mitchell

Chief of Air Service, American Expeditionary Forces, November 1918

As this book was being written, the B-1B Lancer had almost twenty years of nearly continuous combat in the Middle East and South-West Asia, while also projecting power in Europe and the Asia/Pacific regions. By all accounts, the B-1B has been a highly successful weapon system in America’s wars of the twenty-first century. But it has been employed in ways that would have been unimaginable when the swing-wing bomber was first conceived.

The concept of strategic bombing was developed in the aftermath of the First World War. Airpower advocates such as Hugh Trenchard in the United Kingdom, Billy Mitchell in the United States, and Giulio Douhet in Italy envisioned that bombers could fly over the stalemated war in the trenches to deliver knockout blows directly against the enemy’s homeland. Implementing strategic bombing required airplanes with long range and a heavy payload of bombs, navigation capability, and accurate bombsights.

During the Second World War, the Germans tried and failed to conduct an effective strategic bombing offensive against Great Britain, while the United States and United Kingdom mounted a massive strategic air offensive against Germany. It was extremely costly in both human and material terms. The Allied strategic air campaign failed either to break German civilian morale or to halt industrial production. But it did grind down German airpower to the point that France could be invaded, and effectively opened another front whose defense consumed a significant portion of Germany’s human, material, and industrial resources.

Strategic bombing in the Second World War reached its apotheosis in the Pacific theater. Equipped with the advanced Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber based in the Mariana Islands, the Americans burned numerous Japanese cities to the ground. Two nuclear bombs dropped from B-29s increased the effectiveness of strategic bombing a thousand-fold. Japan surrendered without being invaded. In less than three decades, strategic bombing had developed from an idea to the most revolutionary advance in the history of warfare.

Within a few years of the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union became engaged in the Cold War with the United States and its allies. The Cold War was fought in many ways: ideology, culture, economics, diplomacy, insurgency, and limited war in places like Korea. But just as strategic airpower was viewed as the alternative to trench warfare in the aftermath of the First World War, the Americans viewed strategic airpower, now armed with nuclear weapons, as the alternative to the deployment of a ruinously expensive conventional deterrent to Soviet aggression. If the Soviets launched a general war, ground forces would act as a tripwire and victory would be achieved by the bombers that would have turned the Soviet homeland and its satellite countries into blasted, irradiated wastelands.

B-17G ‘Thunderbird’ flies in formation with its descendant, the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress was America’s first operational four-engine heavy bomber. ‘Thunderbird’ is owned by the Lone Star Flight Museum in Houston, Texas. (Master Sergeant Michael A. Kaplan/US Air Force)

To implement this strategy, the Army Air Forces (AAF) formed the Strategic Air Command (SAC) in 1946. In turn, AAF separated from the United States Army to become the independent United States Air Force (USAF) in 1947, with SAC as its most important component. At first, the B-29 bomber was the mainstay of SAC. The B-29 was first replaced by the Boeing B-50, an improved version of the B-29, and then by the Boeing B-47 Stratojet, SAC’s first jet bomber. Even with aerial refueling, these bombers had to stage from forward bases in Alaska, the United Kingdom, North Africa, Okinawa, and other places to reach targets in the Soviet Union. Another early SAC bomber was the immense Convair B-36 Peacemaker. The B-36 had intercontinental range but being propeller-driven it was really from the previous generation. What SAC wanted was a jet bomber with both intercontinental range and high speed.

The jet-powered long-range bomber appeared in the form of the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, arguably the most important warplane of the post-Second World War era. It was designed in 1948, first flown in 1952, and initially delivered to SAC in 1955. The B-52 gave SAC the capability to launch from bases in the continental United States and refuel in the air from tanker aircraft to fly to the Soviet Union. A B-52 would then penetrate Soviet air defenses at high altitude and speed to deliver nuclear weapons anywhere in the Soviet Union, including at night and in inclement weather. As thermonuclear weapons supplemented and then largely replaced nuclear weapons, the devastation that the B-52 force could deliver increased by orders of magnitude, to the point where it was likely that an all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, Communist China and other Communist countries would have killed hundreds of millions of people in a single day. Although not understood at the time, it is now thought likely that the massive radioactive fallout from this attack might have eventually eliminated most human life in the northern hemisphere. While unimaginably horrific, SAC and the strategy of massive retaliation must be regarded as a total success, since the threat of nuclear annihilation prevented the Cold War from turning into a third World War.

The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress brought together the intercontinental range and large payload of the B-36 with the high-speed performance of the B-47 in one aircraft. The key technology that enabled the B-52 was the Pratt & Whitney J57 twin-spool turbojet engine. The aircraft in this photograph are the B-52D model, which was the first model to be put in large-scale production. (New England Air Museum collection)

For every weapon, there will be a countermeasure, and as the B-52 entered service, the USAF was already beginning to consider its successor. The Soviet Union was developing jet-powered fighter interceptor aircraft and surface-to-air missiles to shoot down the B-52. What SAC needed was a means to evade these threats and deliver weapons against heavily defended targets. The search for the replacement started the USAF and the American aerospace industry down an extraordinarily convoluted path that half a century later would see the B-1B Lancer dropping precision-guided bombs on terrorists long after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.

Chapter 2

B-70 Valkyrie

‘My feeling is, and it is very strong, that we must maintain manned aircraft in our retaliatory force as well [as intercontinental ballistic missiles].’

Lieutenant General Bernard A. Schriever

Commander, Air Research and Development Command, 1959–1961

WS-110A

SAC was satisfied with the B-52, which gave it extraordinary striking power delivered with jet performance at intercontinental range. But the development time for modern weapon systems is so long that when a new weapon system is introduced into service, it is time to begin developing its replacement. As far back as 1953 (two years before the delivery of the first B-52 to SAC), the industry periodical Aviation Week reported:

No decision has been reached, but a proposal is circulating around USAF headquarters to eliminate all but a small part of the Boeing B-52 production program. Feeling in some USAF quarters that the difference between B-47 and B-52 performance is not worth the cost of the latter program. Strategic Air Command also anticipates getting supersonic bombers soon enough to make to make the B-52 strictly a short interim measure.

As the B-52 approached service introduction, the USAF began to explore options for the next generation of strategic bombing system. Each option that was considered was audacious in its own way. The high level of funding that Congress lavished on the military in general during the period and the USAF in particular meant that the USAF did not have to pick one option, but instead proceeded with all of them.

Weapon System (WS)-107A was a truly revolutionary concept, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). Guided ballistic missiles saw limited service in the Second World War in the form of the German A-4 (called the V-2 in German propaganda), and there had been some development of longer-range ballistic missiles since then, but the ICBM needed greatly increased range compared to the A-4. Implementing an ICBM would require vast improvements in structures, light-weight thermonuclear warheads, powerful and efficient rocket engines, and long-range guidance and navigation. To hedge risk, the USAF developed both the SM-65 Atlas missile under WS-107A-1 with Convair as its prime contractor and the SM-68 Titan under WS-107A-2 with Martin as the prime contractor.

The great attraction of the ICBM was that it flew though outer space on the way to its target, so fast and high that it rendered air defenses obsolete. The ICBM was unstoppable. The risks of the ICBM included its technical feasibility, its reliability, and its ability to accurately place a nuclear warhead on the target. The bomber pilots who ran SAC also experienced initial difficulty accepting a weapon system that put their crews in launch control centers pushing buttons, rather than in cockpits. In the end, WS-107A would not only be the basis of the American ICBM program but also lay the foundation for much of the American civil and military space programs.

The SM-65 Atlas was the product of the WS-107A-1 program to develop America’s first intercontinenta ballistic missile. This particular missile is on display at the Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum in Ashland, Nebraska. (Author)

The WS-110A was less revolutionary in concept than a WS-107A in that it was a manned bomber, but what a bomber! In 1955, Mach 1 flight was less than a decade old, Mach 2 flight had been achieved in only a few experimental aircraft, and no human being had ever flown at Mach 3. WS-110A envisioned an aircraft with the range and payload of the B-52 but flying at higher altitudes and perhaps as fast as Mach 3. It’s indicative of the technological optimism of the period that such an airplane could have been seriously considered.

The third of the programs, WS-125A, was even more ambitious than WS-110A. At least WS-110A used jet engines, which were an existing technology. WS-125A was based on implementing the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP)/Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) work into an operational bomber. In theory, nuclear propulsion would give a bomber unlimited range. The USAF gave contracts to Convair and Lockheed to develop WS-125A.

WS-125A turned out to be an utterly impractical concept, proceeding in fits and starts until finally cancelled in 1961 and never producing an actual aircraft. It might have been possible to protect the crew from the radiation created by a nuclear power plant, but a nuclear-powered bomber would have been impossible to maintain safely. The crash of a nuclear airplane would have caused an environmental catastrophe. Even in an era of infatuation with the promise of nuclear technology and a widespread lack of concern about environmental protection, a nuclear-powered bomber was impractical and unacceptable.

B-58A Hustler

WS-110A was not the first USAF supersonic bomber program. Preceding it was the Convair B-58A Hustler. Part of the famed family of Convair delta-wing aircraft that included the XF-92A, F-102 Delta Dagger, F-106 Delta Dart, and F2Y Sea Dart, the B-58A first flew in 1956 and entered SAC service in 1960. With its elegant and sleek appearance and blazing Mach 2 maximum speed, the B-58A captured public attention and remains a favorite of aviation fans to this day.

The Convair B-58A Hustler was the first American supersonic bomber. It was fast, beautiful and unloved by SAC, which disliked its short range, high operations and maintenance costs, and poor safety record. (US Air Force)

As impressive and beautiful as the B-58A undoubtedly was, SAC never liked it. It was never designed for intercontinental range, and the actual airplane that was built had even less range than the specification. Major General John McConnell, the SAC Director of Plans, observed that ‘as long as Russia – and not Canada – remained the enemy, range was important.’ The complex and technologically immatur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 The Rise of the American Strategic Bomber
• Chapter 2 B-70 Valkyrie
• Chapter 3 B-1A
• Chapter 4 From A to B
• Chapter 5 The Supersonic Cadillac
• Chapter 6 Nuclear Weapons
• Chapter 7 B-1B Development and Testing
• Chapter 8 Building the B-1B
• Chapter 9 SAC Service
• Chapter 10 After the Cold War
• Chapter 11 Combat Debut
• Chapter 12 The Global War on Terror
• Chapter 13 Maintaining and Modernizing the BONE
• Chapter 14 The B-1B and Air Force Global Strike Command
• Chapter 15 Global Presence
• Chapter 16 Twilight of the BONE
• Bibliography