There are twenty nuclear bombs in Volkel, perhaps twenty-two. The people of Volkel know it but laugh about it. Drones have recently started circling above the bombs. They laugh about that too. They don’t realize that Volkel has been one for years primary target of the Russians.
The Volkel bombs are part of the retaliation that NATO is keeping in reserve in case the Russians send nuclear missiles this way unannounced. The intention was always that F-16s would quickly deliver the bombs to the east before the missiles arrived, which takes about fifteen minutes. F-16 pilots were ready to fly out, as it were, 24/7 with their engines running and thermoses of coffee.
The task is now in the hands of F-35As. With their stealth properties, they are invisible to the radar, which greatly increases the chance that they will arrive safely at the enemy to ensure mutually guaranteed destruction, mutually assured destructionto make concrete.
In the Netherlands, it is said, mainly nuclear bombs of the B61-12 type are stored. These are hydrogen bombs with an adjustable capacity of 0.3 to 50 kilotons of TNT. The F-35A can carry two at a time. Gravity bombs, they are called. Or: free-fall bombs, which sounds more fun. But they are simply bombs that, when released from the aircraft, are left to fend for themselves and the effects of gravity, wind and air resistance. They are dumb bombs.
Now you don’t have to aim so precisely with a nuclear bomb, for example the Nagasaki bomb (21 kilotons of TNT) was 3 km off course due to a crosswind and was still very devastating, but it sounds strangely careless to use unguided bombs for retaliation. Remember, the F-35 pilots must assume that the GPS system has been hacked or destroyed and radio beacons have been silenced. Will there be anything to that retaliation? Literature shows itself lighthearted: it Inertial Navigation Systemwhich relies on gyroscopes and accelerometers, is certainly as good as GPS. Only the wind speed is a bit more difficult to determine, but the targeting computer can it. It’ll be fine!
The outsider who tries to take into account the Volkel retaliation encounters a strange problem. The flight range of the F-35A is stated to be 2,175 kilometers, just enough to reach Moscow from Volkel. ‘Licorice tanks’ would increase the range, but they are not available. What is more painful is that the F-35 pilot does not have to count on refueling in the air. Tanker aircraft such as the Stratotanker or Pegasus have no stealth properties and are promptly shot down at the start of a nuclear war. “Most NATO pilots accept there is little hope of realistic return,” writes Annie Jacobson in her disturbing statement Nuclear War (Dutton, 2024). Flying back is out of the question.
What you also don’t quickly think about is that a nuclear bomb dropped from a height of 10 km, depending on its aerodynamics, can have a fall time of 30 seconds or more. In that half minute, the Earth’s rotation has moved the target at our latitude by almost 9 km. There should be one like that targeting computer also still to be considered, although processing the wind profile between the aircraft and the earth’s surface will be more difficult. In retrospect, it is a miracle that the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki hit their target, the targeting devices (Norden bombsights) that were used in WWII did not have a good reputation. Yet they were so complicated, complete with analog computers, that today you still don’t understand how they worked.
Drawing of British Lancaster bombers attacking the Moehne dam during a historic ‘dambuster’ attack on May 17, 1943.
PA Images via Getty Images
The British bomb aimers had it remarkably simpler when they shot large bombs during the night of 16 to 17 May 1943. dams in West Germany had to blow up. The Germans had protected the underwater dams against attack with torpedo nets. But the English inventor Barnes Wallis designed a huge barrel-shaped bomb that skipped over the water, avoiding the nets until it collided with the dams and exploded. The ‘bouncing bomb’ only started hopping when it was released from a height of only 18 meters and had been given ‘counterspin’ in advance by a special motor. Strict requirements were also imposed on the distance to the dam.
This was not a job for conventional aiming devices, but the British quickly found a solution. They mounted two obliquely aimed spotlights under the Lancaster bombers that cast narrow beams of light on the water in such a way that the light spots coincided when the aircraft flew at exactly 18 meters.
The correct distance to the dams was also easy to determine. The dams had towers on either side that were 200 meters apart. Suppose you had to release the bomb on Wallis’s instructions as soon as you saw the towers at an angle of 10 degrees, then you found the right moment with the help of a plywood plate in which two nails had been hammered, which you also saw at an angle of 10 degrees when you pressed the plate against your face. You made nails and towers optically coincide and you were done.
This sounded too simple to be true, so we put it to the test last Sunday. The towers on the SW side of the Rijksmuseum are 35 meters apart and are seen at an angle of 19.8 degrees when you stand 100 meters in front of them. So two nails were pressed into a piece of cardboard so that you saw them at an angle of 19.8 degrees when you pressed the plate, with a cutout for the nose, against the cheekbones. Making nails and towers coincide: the distance was 102 meters if the Google Earth ‘ruler’ is precise. A small feeling of happiness on this gray Sunday.
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