The US is about to move towards a far more likely first use of nuclear weapons, with word that the Air Force has “completed flight testing” of the cost-and-performance-plagued F35A Lightning fighter, all units of which are being “upgraded” to carry thermonuclear weapons.
What this means, as explained in a new article in Popular Mechanics, is that the world’s most costly weapons program (at $1.7 trillion), a fifth-generation fighter, supposedly “invisible” to radar (that actually cannot fight and is not invisible to advanced radars), now has a new mission to justify its existence and continued production: dropping dial-able “tactical” nuclear weapons that can be as small as 0.3 kilotons or up to 50 kilotons in explosive power.
Now 0.3 kilotons is “just” the equivalent of 300 tons of dynamite, which supposedly makes them “useable,” meaning not holocaust-causing (that is assuming that some country backing the targeted country doesn’t decide to respond in kind and we go up the escalation ladder quickly to ever bigger bombs. Meanwhile, \ dialed up to its maximum 50-kiloton power each F35A bomb would be significantly more than twice as powerful as the nuclear bomb that leveled Nagasaki.
The Popular Mechanics article, also published in Yahoo News, quotes Pentagon sources as saying the new F35A capability gives the US flexibility to deliver nukes to targets in a country threatening the US, and also to recall them up to the last second before dropping the weapon since the plane would be piloted. But this supposed advantage of a manned delivery system being recallable is a fantasy.
As Daniel Ellsberg has exposed in detail in his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine, written based on his decades of work with a top security clearance on behalf of the Secretary of Defense office investigating command-and-control procedures and practices of the nation’s nuclear forces, there is no way to guarantee that a pilot ordered on a nuclear strike mission will receive — or believe — any message or signal ordering a cancellation of the attack order.
Actually, hundreds of these Air Force versions of the F-35 have been getting so-called “block four’ alterations, with bulging farings replacing their formerly sleek bodies, in order to allow the carrying of two elongated Hydrogen bombs inside their fuselages, where they won’t present a larger radar image as bombs carried externally under wings would do. These re-configured planes, which also have software upgrades to allow them to prime, unlock and release their twin nukes, are being delivered to forward bases near Russia and China within the relatively short range of the bomb-laden planes.
The idea (hopefully wishful thinking), is that such planes, armed with their two nukes, could streak across a Russian and/or Chinese border at supersonic speed, flying low to the ground, to strike government buildings, military bases, and missile silos in a surprise strike, leaving the target country unable to retaliate.
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