Vulcan News see PM.
MMEMatty amplified his question about what happened afterwards and this will explain some of it. All the V-bomber flights were fully planned ie from take-off to recovery. In the 70s there was a change of policy and this was not received without argument. From this we can deduce that the crews were all Supermen and DID expect to survive.
The early plans called for some 150 odd V\'s, 1,500 odd B47s and 600 odd B52s not to mention B58s and sundry others. The rockets would have got in first although not in the numbers as inthe later 60s. By the mid-60s the B47s had gone to be replaced by more rockets.
We were certainly on the side of the big battalions.
Fully planned also meant taking the shortest way out. For the deep penetration sorties after a 300 mile plus low level penetration we certainly did not have the fuel to get to UK nor would we want to flying back through the devastation we had just wrought. We planned to get back to our designated friendly country and then try and find somewhere to land.
Did we plan to rearm and reattack? All I can say here is a \'possibly\' and then only in the early days when we might have had more bombs than jets and the Sooviet threat was not fully developed. As the number of bombers built up it was pretty close to 1+1. Not only that but the Soviet threat had also become one of MAD so it was extremely unlikely that we could have launched reattacks.
Plan Dropshot, edited by Anthony Cave-Brown is the US War Plans in 1947 for war in 1957. It makes fascinating reading especially the bits where they postulate what the UK will provide. What makes this so interesting is that it exactly mirrors the later deployment on the V-Force and Canberras - Malta, Cyprus, Singapore as well as UK and this long before the UK had even - in Secret - decided to develop the bomb. This book was printed in the 70s.