According to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, we’ve been flying exercise missions off the Iranian coast doing “over the shoulder” nuclear weapons delivery demonstrations for their radar operators. Classy. Also, check out the Rube Goldberg meets Jack D. Ripper technique below:
Be My Blog 
But that’s now how we would actually deliver a nuke, is it? I mean, those are like F100s or something in the diagram.
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No. That’s not how you deliver a nuke anymore. If you’re the United States, the way you deliver a nuke is call up a desk jockey in Colorado and you give him a secret code from inside the President’s football. He sends what amounts to a carefully crafted email that ultimately results in a couple of shut-ins with magic keys sitting at a console going through yet another drill that turns out actually not to be a drill this time. The rockets launch out of tubes either mounted in the ground in someplace like South Dakota or they’re in submarines, which may as well be tied to a pier in San Diego.
When you hear me cracking jokes about waging “unrestricted submarine warfare” on some landlocked nation with no seaports, you should understand those are really, really fscking dark jokes.
Okay, technically, that’s how you deliver a strategic weapon. If you’re planning on dropping one of those wacky tactical weapons that are all the rage now, you might still fly them in on a B2 or something.
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Yeah. The reference was to tactical nukes (B-61 earth penetrating variety) being dropped on Iranian nuclear facilities. Hence the saber-rattling was being done with OTS exercises.
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The key to this techique is it lets the plane fly in under radar, and gives him enough time to get out. He can also let it go as he’s in the climb but still going forward, so the nuke flies forward. The nuke continues east, and the plane does an Immelmann and flies back west.
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As of 1952, this sort of loop was considered the fallback position if a Goofy Loop failed. I like Hersh but this hardly seems print-worthy now, though I’ll read the article.
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while we’re on the topic . . .
Semi-related: The newest issue of The New Yorker has an excellent and long article by George Packer on the issue of fighting a counterinsurgency war. The DOD has not wanted to cop to the fact that there is an insurgency, and longstoryshort that’s one of the main reasons we’re f—ed. Really great article, a must read.
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