2852 meters....
Think about what they were expecting to use it on - HORDES of Soviet ground troops and armor pouring through the Fulda Gap.
Our folks would have been quickly overwhelmed, so this seemed like a good idea to stop the Reds.
Any Cold War warriors out here from that time period, stationed in Germany, waiting for the “balloon to go up”, I would love to hear your stories.
I worked for a Colonel some years ago, Russian language genius. Great guy, super intelligent, he spoke and wrote fluent Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, multiple dialects and all. He spent a lot of time listening in on Soviet radio chatter to see if they were coming across.
Late 50s, early 60s he was there. Must have been a tense time.
I’d love to hear some stories from that era myself, I did learn many years ago that one of the reasons that Truman would not authorize MacArthur to ‘go nuke’ on the North Koreans and Red Chinese during the Korean War, was that Truman knew something MacArthur didn’t, and that was that the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal consisted of 13 and only 13 ‘Fat Man’ Nagasaki-style atomic bombs, and they were needed in the event that Stalin decided to try and push the Western powers to the sea and occupy Western Europe.
And those 13 Nagasaki-style atomic bombs had to be assembled and then carefully transferred to their aircraft, either B-50 (hopped up B-29’s) or the new and trouble-prone B-36 Peacemakers. It was a damn difficult time.