Hacker News Reader

Not the first time this sort of thing happened.

http://www.tailsthroughtime.com/2010/06/prior-to-arrival-of-...

The 1952 Carswell AFB Tornado

In 1952, 2/3 of the B-36 bomber force of USA knocked out in less than 30 minutes by tornados. And I'm pretty sure B-36 was the only strategic nuclear weapon delivery system at the time, as this was before nuclear powered submarines or ICBMs.

View on HN

The B-29 was the first nuclear strategic bomber. They were decommissioned in 1960.

The B-29 wasn't strategic in terms of Cold War capability against the USSR, in fact SAC had downgraded it to 'medium bomber' in classification.

SAC did modify a few dozen with inflight refueling as the B-29MR but that required stripping off nearly all defensive armament and giving over half of the bomb capacity to fuel tanks. And even then the missions would be one-way: http://b-29.org/charlie/charlie1.html

The developed B-50 was semi-strategic and had inflight refuelling capability from the outset.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com