Strategic Air Command

And you go back to, again, bringing it back to modern times, Aero's former director, Sean Kirkpatrick, acting as one of the primary sources for uh, for a wall street journal article, uh, they tried to explain that away as, uh, being an EMP device.

Uh, the problem was the, uh, the EMP device that they, you know, show in the article, uh, that didn't even have an RFP for it until I think something like four years after the incident and was described as being this huge, you know, thing to move, uh, yet strategic air command, there's a telex that you can go find, uh, that's declassified talks about, they had, uh, They could not find any reason for 10 missiles to go offline, and it was considered an extreme concern to the base.

So to basically say that they were testing EMP-related stuff on live missiles in the height of the Cold War without informing Strategic Air Command, it's just absurd.

And it goes to the point where it doesn't have to be alien or something weird, but the...

You don't also have to lie to make something up.

And the machinery of war wasn't waiting for his post.

On October 24th, Strategic Air Command went to DEFCON 2.

One step below general war.

And it's an extraordinary escalation.

Check them out at AviationSoul.com to understand what the XB-70 was supposed to be.

You have to go back to the early years of the 1950s and understand what Strategic Air Command was genuinely afraid of.

The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress was entering service and it was an extraordinary aircraft.

Eight engines, intercontinental range nuclear capability.

The people at Strategic Air Command were proud of it and right to be.

But the same people running Strategic Air Command were realists, and what they could see coming worried them considerably.

Soviet surface-to-air missile technology was improving every year.

Soviet interceptors were getting faster and flying higher.

He was running radar missions.

What he said was against SAC, Strategic-- SAC, which is Strategic Air Command, and, and, um, this was, uh, in Warner Robins Air Force Base.

He was stationed at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida at the time.

And we know from JP, Eglin's Air Force Base, there's a lot going on at that base, and it's probably In the history of all this stuff had a lot of top secret and, and some of these more compartmentalized things happening, and that's likely also maybe why my grandfather was there and, and he said it had the world's largest climatic hangar at the time, um, back in the late '40s, early '50s.

Malmstrom Air Force Base is located approximately six miles east of Great Falls, Montana.

In 1954, the base was aligned under Strategic Air Command, or SAC, and the 407th Strategic Fighter Wing was assigned to Great Falls Air Force Base.

The wing's F-84 fighters and KB-29 air refuelers provided fighter escort for SAC's long-range B-36 bombers.

The 341st Bombardment Wing was redesignated the 341st Strategic Missile Wing and activated at Malmstrom Air Force Base on July 1, 1961.

Yes.

So there's – in the United States, there's this great organization called the Strategic Air Command.

And

who are they?

They flew the big bombers.

Right.

And I grew up on in and around strategic air command bases.

So the sound and smell of B-52s is just ingrained in my soul.

The comfortable assumption that a high-flying bomber could always get through was starting to look optimistic.

Strategic Air Command started asking the engineers a simple, brutal question: What if we build something they genuinely cannot catch? North American Aviation won the contract in 1958.

The requirements were, to put it charitably, ambitious.

The new bomber would cruise at Mach three, three times the speed of sound, roughly two thousand miles per hour.