> so that they'd have one good eye to operate the plane after (atomic) bomb detonation.
Serious question, this is quite interesting to me... why? I mean, if the Cold War had gone "Hot" there likely wouldn't have been anywhere for them to land (presumably the Soviets would have bombed the bases), they'd have been basically dead upon takeoff. Seems like they didn't even really need to carry enough fuel for a round trip, just carry enough to get to the target and fly faster. Do you know what the plan was for after the bombs went off?
One, a B-52 can carry more than one nuclear bomb. You want the crew to remain in flying condition after dropping the first one so they can drop more.
Two, you can end up with pretty severe motivational problems if you don't at least make an effort to allow your pilots to return home. Even if you think it's unlikely that they'll make it home, you still want to give them the tools they need to try.
Three, it's not entirely unrealistic that some of them would make it home. Even if every landing strip was destroyed, they could parachute out. The idea that a nuclear war would be a 15-minute orgy of MAD didn't really happen until the 70s. Before that, ICBMs were limited in number and accuracy, and bombers would be carrying out a lot of the strikes, especially on military targets. The war could take a day or two, with B-52s and other bombers making multiple roundtrips. Even afterwards, there was no guarantee that a war between the superpowers would go from zero to full-scale MAD in an instant. It wasn't out of the question that B-52s might be called on for nuclear bombing of a small number of targets in some form of limited nuclear war.
Each plane has more than one planned target, so they need to be able to fly on after hitting the first one. Early versions (before introducing stand-off missiles and cruise missiles) carried up to 8 free-fall bombs.
In the outbound direction they would get aerial-refueled over the arctic, so I don't think they can make a roundtrip. I've read (but don't have any authoritative sources) that the war-plan called for flying to western europe at the end of the mission, but that during simulator training they just shut down the simulator and stepped out after hitting the last target.
Ahh, you and another commenter pointed out multiple targets, I supposed that alone would be reason to need a functioning crew after the detonation. It's interesting stuff.
It definitely is interesting, in a horrifying sort of way.
Those of us who grew up towards the end of the Cold War (I'm assuming most of the participants in this conversation fit that) got exposed to nuclear war as The End of the World As We Know It, a brief, rapid orgy of destruction that leaves everyone dead. And by the 80s, that was probably about right unless the superpowers could figure out some way to keep the war limited in scale.
But there were two or three decades before that stage where the situation was pretty complicated. Nuclear bombs started out envisioned as being an improved version of the strategic bombing campaigns of WWII. (And indeed, neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were the deadliest ones.) As bombs grew in number and power and bombers got better, there was a whole series of moves and countermoves involving better bombers, better interceptors, better radars, short-range ballistic missiles, tactical weapons up to and including nuclear bazookas, ICBMs, ICBM countermeasures, ICBM counter-countermeasures, ICBM counter-counter-countermeasures, submarines armed with ballistic missiles, submarines armed with nuclear torpedoes....
There are three fictional treatments of nuclear war which, to my limited and imperfect knowledge, appear to give a pretty realistic picture of what a real war would have looked like.
Two, surprise surprise, focus on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everybody knows that it came close to a nuclear war, but until I read these, I didn't realize that it literally came down to a single officer objecting to the launch of a nuclear torpedo while on a submarine, while two other officers were in favor and tried to convince him.
Spoiler alert: both end up with the US largely intact and Russian reduced to an extremely niche language, as the disparity in nuclear arms between the two nations in 1962 was enormous.
No doubt all three have inaccuracies, but I think they paint a much more realistic picture of the situation than the more typical "mutants everywhere" or "literally every single human being dies" treatment.
In all seriousness, I think the plan was to make sure our bombs got dropped also. It's not MAD if you can't follow up on either the 'mutual' or the 'assured' part.
