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Ask AI3: What is aircraft?
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It seems reasonable that if general nuclear war is not to be one cataclysmic act of burning each other's citizens to cinders, we must have a manned strategic force of long-endurance aircraft capable of going into China or Russia to find and destroy their strategic forces which continued to threaten us.
It is entirely feasible to employ aircraft such as the B-52 or B-70 in hunter-killer operations against Soviet railway-based missiles.
An aircraft with a load of small nuclear weapons could very conceivably be given a mission to suppress all trains operating within a specified geographic area of Russia -- provided that we had used some of our ICBMs to degrade Russia's air defenses before our bombers got there.
The aircraft could be used to destroy other mobile, fleeting, and imprecisely located targets as well as the known, fixed and hardened targets which can also be destroyed by missile.
Why, then, aren't we planning a larger, more important role for manned military aircraft??
But until we have an effective spacecraft, the answer to the hunter-killer problem is manned aircraft.
However, the aircraft which we have today are tied to large, `` soft '' airfields.
Here then is our problem: aircraft are vital to winning a war today because they can perform those missions which a missile is totally incapable of performing ; ;
but the airfield, on which the aircraft is completely dependent, is doomed by the missile.
This makes today's aircraft a one-shot, or one mission, weapon.
This is the point on which so many people have written off the aircraft in favor of the missile.
But remember this -- it isn't the aircraft which is vulnerable to nuclear rockets, it is the airfield.
Eliminate the vulnerability of aircraft on the ground and you have essentially eliminated its vulnerability to long-range ballistic missiles.
There are four rather obvious ways to reduce or eliminate the vulnerability of aircraft on the ground:
Put aircraft in `` bomb-proof '' hangars when they are on the ground.
Build long-range aircraft which can take off from small ( 3,000-foot ) airfields with runways.
If we could use all the small airfields we have in this country, we could disperse our strategic aircraft by a factor of 10 or more.
Use nuclear propulsions to keep our long-range military aircraft in the air for the majority of their useful life.
Using very high thrust-to-weight ratio engines, develop a vertical-takeoff-and-landing ( VTOL ) long-range military aircraft.
We have the technology today with which to build aircraft shelters which could withstand at least 200 Aj.
There is little enthusiasm for spending money to develop more powerful engines because of the erroneous belief that the aircraft has been made obsolete by the missile.
This same preoccupation with missiles at the expense of aircraft has resulted in our half-hearted effort to develop nuclear propulsion for aircraft.
One seldom hears the analogy `` nuclear propulsion will do for the aircraft what it has already done for the submarine ''.
If, for some reason such as economy, we are not going to develop aircraft nuclear propulsion with a sense of national urgency, then we should turn our effort to developing jet engines with a thrust-to-weight ratio of 12 or 15 to one.

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