London's B-52: Meet Cold War Britain's Nuclear V Bomber
These Cold War-era planes were meant to deliver atomic bombs just like the American B-52. Key point: The RAF invested heavily in these platforms and used them in the 1950s and 1960s. Here is their story. During World War II, the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) Bomber Command deployed huge strategic bombers on a massive scale to bombard German cities at night. Postwar, the RAF sought to evolve its bomber fleet to the jet and nuclear age. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated that a single nuclear weapon could inflict more destruction than a hundred conventional bombers—and p...