Air to air nuclear weapons
 

On 19th July 1957 the world's only air to air nuclear missile test took place.
An anniversary to remember: The world's only air-to-air nuke was fired on 19 July, 1957 ? The Register

Seems they thought nuclear was the answer to everything back then!

Indeed, nothing quite says cold war like unguided short range nuclear weapons such as the Genie and the Davy Crockett....

Having seen some nuke tipped SAMs one day I (cold war days, when I was young and spry) recall being for a moment glad that I didn't fly fighters. I figured that if we had them, our counterparts on the Sov ships had them.

Could the trail aircraft in the video be a B-57 Canberra, by any chance?

Replies on theregister suggest it's a Martin B-57 which is an American - made Canberra?

Andy: Quite correct.

Yep. My dad was a physicist and nuclear engineer. In the 50's we lived in Idaho Falls, near the Idaho National Laboratory where he worked on nuclear reactor powered turbine engines for bombers. The compressor stage fed compressed air into the reactor where it was heated, then it exited thru the hot turbine stage. The project was cancelled, and later in life he commented that it spewed radiation into the atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircra...ear_Propulsion

If you want to go nuclear 'whacky projects' then look no further than General Atomics (yes the same people that make Predator/Reaper) and their Project ORION.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l2QopJbDBs

Starfish Prime was the nuke to beat them all. The results were vastly different to what had been calculated by the boffins - and by vastly different, I mean an EMP of substantial magnitude.
Fortunately, the idea of ever-increasing numbers of nuke-testings in space has been canned, and for good reasons.

There was a nuclear warheaded missile which the Lightning might have carried, called Red Dean.

FB

Red Dean wasn't nuclear tipped and wouldn't have been carried by a Lightning. it was an large Vickers build active radar homing missile for the thin wing 'Supersonic' Javelin. Both the missile and the aircraft were cancelled in 1955/56. The best description of its configuration would be a Red Top on Steroids. The Warhead weight of it was 100 lb HE.The weight of the smallest atomic warheads in development for UK defensive missiles was between 4 and 6 times that.

Surely any weapon dropped from an aircraft that isn't a ground burst, is Air to Air

I have seen somewhere (possibly Derek Wood's Project Cancelled) a line drawing of a Genie-equipped Lightning, with the caption that it was schemed under project number something-or-other.

The 600lb bomb was neither :p

At the time, the physicists and engineers were able to offer a nuclear solution to any question asked of them.

Just as the NDB offered a catch-all solution to the submarine threat, the air to air N option would stop any conceivable red threat from over the pole.

At a time when there was conceived to be a real threat from a perceived bomber imbalance, the air to air N option was a sensible counter force.

We can't always review the decisions of the past throught the spectacles we wear today.

I know Non-Directional Beacons have been around since the 1940s or even earlier, but I'd have thought coastal- and night-effect would've reduced their anti-sub capabilities... :)

(PS I am old enough to remember Westland Wasps)

I think the idea is to foul the props by dropping the beacon into them :)

There was a photo (or photos) in Tim McLelland's Lightning book of a trial Genie installation on a Lightning. The missile was fitted to a recess in the belly.