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As an intel puke who did mission support (at the squadron and wing level) and threat assessments for nuclear strike missions, I can affirm your comments.

Looking at the laydown plan (and timing) for nuclear war in western Europe was sobering. One of my units was based stateside, but we had squadrons that would deploy to Germany and Italy if the balloon had gone up. Some of their scheduled “lines” represented the third or fourth nuke on a target. If a pilot or crew was off on their timing by just a few minutes for any reason (late takeoff, dodging enemy fighters or SAMs, etc) they could arrive in the target area at the same time as another weapon, with a bigger yield. At that point, plane, crew and weapon would become one with the cosmos.

My work in the tactical nuke arena was with F-4s and F-16s. All of our missions promised pilots or crews the possibility of return if everything went according to plan-and there was little margin for error. I had friends in the F-111 community who told me there were lines out of Lakenheath that were truly “one-way” missions; the distance, laydown timing and threats gave the Aardvark crews virtually no chance of survival.

But even that pales with the Buff crews who (in the pre-ALCM days) were supposed to go deep inside the Soviet Union and put nukes on target. I was in SAC during my enlisted days and some of the “landing” bases for B-52s and KC-135s were diverse, to say the least. Can’t recall any of the Buffs returning to home station under SIOP and very few of the tankers; it was assumed that their bases would be vaporized early in the conflict, so (if they survived their trip to Russia) they would land at another base and take it from there.

Tanker crews were under orders to give every pound of gas to the bomber, saving just enough for safe separation after the refueling. The Buff or FB-111 would go on to their target; the tanker would crash in northern Canada, on the polar ice cap or somewhere in the ocean.

I was involved with the planning process and software for the SIOP and later as a battlestaff director on the old Looking Glass and as a missileer. The slim chances of bombers and tankers getting to a recovery base were evident even to the young NCOs who worked with me. ALCMs made a huge difference when they went operational, the chances went up though not by too much. I don’t think the bomber and tanker guys truly realized how tightly their mission plan wedged into all the others. As a missileer on my first AF tour I gave a mission brief for our missile wing to the bomb wing crews. I told them that they needed to be very quick on their MITO and fan out because if they were not they might be sharing airspace with a Minuteman ICBM coming out of the hole. I also told them that if they were on the ready line still decoding the message and saw the trails rising from the missile field that they could take their time until the field cleared and start worrying about deconfliction. That was a sobering thought for most. They always thought of themselves as the single entity in the plan rather than a tight fitting part.