1225th Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment

Belaya Long Range Aviation Base

Irkutsk Oblast, U.S.S.R

August 19, 1969

00:30 hrs

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The Tu-95 taxied to the end of the 3-mile long asphalt and made a sweeping u-turn before it lined itself up with its nose gear on the white median line. Its commander, Col. Anton Babayev, was a patient man. He waited, his hand on the throttle and right foot on the brakes, eyes impassive, now completely accustomed to amber green glow of the cockpit.

The Tu-95 Strategic bomber has had a storied past. When Soviet forces invaded Nazi Germany, they forcibly took back with them 2500 of the best Nazi automobile and aviation engineers and designers. The Americans too had their own get-the-nerds version, whereby 1600 Nazi scientists and engineers came over to the US, in an operation code-named Paperclip. 

Unlike the Soviets, the Americans didn’t have to use force. The Nazis happily moved in, set up house in government-purchased cottages and villas and drove government purchased late model cars and went about developing ground-breaking American aerospace technology. 

In fact the Nazis discovered to their delight that they had a lot of sympathizers among the Americans, with whom they could get misty-eyed nostalgic, reminiscing about the “good old days” using slave labor in their industries back in Germany. Short of being able to break out into the “Horst Wessel” song, they say what they liked.

The Soviets methodically stripped down the Junkers bomber factory in Dessau and shipped every little bit of machinery and design drawing to Kuibyshev in the USSR, where factory was rebuilt from ground up.

Among the Germans abducted by the Soviets was a brilliant aviation engineer and Nazi Party member named Ferdinand Brandner. Under direct orders from Stalin, Brandner was handled with kid gloves, given anything he wanted, a life of luxury and a pretty Russian woman and tasked to create new kinds of war planes. In time, he was co-opted into the Tupolev Design Bureau.

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In 1943, at the height of the Second World War, an American B29 bomber, its rudder slightly damaged in an air raid over the Japanese city of Sapporo, force landed on a country road outside Vladivostok in the eastern tip of the USSR. Earlier in the war, as a part of the Allied forces, the Soviet Union had wanted to lease a few B29s to study the design but the Americans had seen through them and hemmed and hawed deliberately, playing for time.

Now, with a B29 on the ground, the Soviets refused to give it back. Three more lightly damaged B-29s soon followed after emergency landings from participating in raids over Japan. The US demanded them back, but the Soviets kept them and asked the Tupolev Design Bureau to replicate them instead.

Ferdinand Brandner was put to work on the design. The result was a re-engineered B-29 called the “Tupolev Tu-4.”

Realizing that the Tu-4’s piston engines were not powerful enough, Brandner redesigned the aircraft and fitted four Kuznetsov coupled turboprops, each equipped with two contra-rotating propellors (see the box in the image above). 

The aircraft was initially called the Tu-20, but the name was later dropped in favor of the Tu-95. In time, NATO gave the Tu-95 a code name – Bear.

You are dying to know what a contra-rotating propellor is. Hang on, Uncle Spunky will tell you everything. 

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As Col. Babayev lined up the Bear for take-off, straight ahead the pitch darkness was punctured by two strings of blue runway lights that seemed to converge into a blurry point at the far distance. Beside him, his co-pilot, reed-thin Maj. Illya Molodchi, leaned forward a little and then turned his head sideways till he was staring at the swept-back, slightly drooping right wing, weighted down by the two Kuznetsov-12Ms, the most powerful turbo-prop engines ever developed.

Right now, the Kuznetsovs were barely ticking over at a sedate 600 rpm but already the contra-rotating propeller sets were deafening, their roar penetrating even heavily insulated ear pads in the crews’ helmets. When the propellers reached 1200rpm, the Bear would be in the air, cruising at 0.85 times the speed of sound.

An interesting fact about the Kuznetsov engine is that at cruising speed, the tips of its propellers break the sound barrier, making the Bear the noisiest aircraft in the world, so noisy in fact, that submarines can easily detect one flying overhead with their passive sonars. There is a belief that Tu-95 crew have experienced significant loss of hearing after prolonged service on this aircraft.

As to the Bear’s speed, to put it in perspective, regular commercial jets cruise at around 0.80 Mach, while the Tu-95 cruises at 0.85 Mach . This makes the Bear the fastest turbo-prop on the planet, which it is even today, being still in service with the Russian Strategic Air Command.

The Russians, when they see something that works, they stick with it. Tu-95 Bears have been around and going strong even today.

Contra-Rotating Propellers (CRPs, as they are known in the aviation word) are a set of two propellers on the same axis, coupled by a set of planetary gears to make them rotate in opposite directions, the second prop a bit smaller in diameter than the one in front. Between them, the two propellers coax the onrushing airflow and shove it backward with the thrust of 15000 horses. 

The product of Russian aviation genius, CRPs provide greater fuel efficiency, higher speeds and more power. 

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CRPs were just one of many Soviet technological advances. In science and technology, they were crawling with geniuses. Unfortunately they were, like the American saying goes, “all dressed up with nowhere to go”. Soviet scientists worked within a government structure that did nothing to motivate them to apply their scientific innovations to practical use. Brilliant research papers sat forgotten on shelves.

Likewise, Radio Transparent Technology, the Soviet moniker for Stealth technology, was gathering dust on some forgotten cupboard in the Soviet Academy of Sciences until the early 1990s, when an imploding Soviet Union spilt it’s secrets like a vanquished T-Rex sprawled on the ground, its guts spilling out.

Every victory has its spoils and the fall of communism was no different. In the chaos of the latter half of the Gorbachev years, the Soviet Union leaked secrets like a sieve. Everything was up for a price. An engineer at the Lockheed Advanced Development Projects (a.k.a. Skunk Works), got his hands on a Russian scientific paper and said, ‘Hey that’s easy. We could do something like that’ and before long, the world had its first stealth fighter, the F117.

But I digress. Let’s get back to Col. Babayev and his crew.

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Standing frozen at the end of the strip, the giant bomber thrummed and grumbled as it strained against its leash, the effort to stay still sending shuddering vibrations through it’s air-frame. Outside, the night was moonless and the air surprisingly still, almost as if nature had decided to pause and bear witness to what was about to happen.

Tonight, the Bear would need all the power her Kuznetsovs packed, just to clear the runway. She had a passenger with a one-way ticket, a teardrop-shaped metal object weighing in at just over 22 tons.

Russians love giving names to inanimate objects and so the passenger too had a name – “Kuzkina Tetya”

In Russian, it meant literally “Kuzka’s Aunt”.

The passenger was so named after her illustrious twin, Kuzkina Mat, who had made a similar one-way flight eight years prior. Kuzkina Mat had been a test. Some say Kuzkina Mat was given her name by none other than Nikita Khrushchev.

The story goes that when the Americans tested what was for them, their most powerful thermonuclear device – a fusion device that was code-named Castle Bravo and had an yield of 15 megatons, the Soviets gave it a name of their own – ‘Kuzka’, a derogatory reference commonly used in Russia those days, roughly translated in English as ‘pipsqueak’.

Khrushchev is reported to have sneered at the American ambassador derisively at a meeting during the 1961 May-1st celebrations, “My obirayemsya pokazat’ im Kuz’kina mat!” (That’s it? 15 Megatons? Well, soon we are going to show you Kuzka’s mother).

And Kuzka’s mother she certainly turned out to be. The Kuzkina Mat test had the explosive power equivalent to the simultaneous explosion of 58 million tons of TNT. That was ten times the power of all the bombs dropped in the Second World War. Her mushroom cloud was 64 kms high and 40 kms in diameter and her shockwave travelling round the earth three times, breaking windows, cracking foundations as far as Marseilles.

Over the years, Kuzkina Mat also got to be called by many other names, including Tsar Bomba and Big Ivan.

In comparison, Kuzkina Tetya, though only slightly larger in size and weight, was going to be infinitely more destructive. It had been rated at 105 Megatons.

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The tower broke in over the whine of the Kuznetsovs, the voice over the radio sounding disembodied and almost casual, “Eto dvizheniye. Tetya Dobycha Kuz’kina yedet priyatno i legko, Polkovnik . Udachi.” (It’s a go. Drop Kuzka’s Aunt off and get the hell out of there, Colonel. She has bad breath. Good luck).

Babayev chuckled. “Spasibo , derzhat’ vodku okhlazhdennoy (Thank you, I am not the one who’s going to kiss her ass. Just keep the vodka chilled and stop worrying about us),” he said, as his right hand tightened its grip over the throttle lever and slid it forward while at the same time, his foot came off the brakes.

The Tu-95 heaved and then swerved momentarily, as though it was caught by surprise. It’s nose veered off the median line for a moment, before it regained its heading and charged down the asphalt, slowly accelerating as it raced toward the other end of the runway.

120 knots…130…140…150… the massive bomber labored to reach the magic figure – 200 knots, while the far-end perimeter fence and the south-side guard tower dead ahead, rushed forward to embrace it.

“If we are going by road, don’t you think we ought to slow down a bit, Boss?” Illya was known in the base for his understatements and his wry humor.

Babayev grinned, “Hang on, Illya, this devochka can fly us to the moon if she wants to. Here we go.”

The bomber staggered up into the air, the four Kuznetsovs screaming on full throttle. As soon as he felt it leave the asphalt, Babayev retracted the landing gear, afraid it might snag against the perimeter fence otherwise. The belly of the Bear cleared the fence with only a few meters to spare.

Thankfully, the land around the base had been razed flat, so there was no possibility of hitting a tree or a phone line.

Once off the ground the Tu-95 labored on, at a 20° pitch until it levelled off finally at 37000 feet, its nose pointing southward. After a while, everything went black as the world’s largest fresh water lake, the Baikal, slid by 7 miles below.

Once over Mongolia, the bomber would gain a further mile up before settling at 42000 feet. Thirty minutes out, the Bear made a slight course change to south-easterly as it entered Mongolian airspace and continued speeding along like a silver dart, eight miles above the barren steppes. It was going to be a nice two and half hour flight.

The last one and quarter hour would be inside Chinese airspace.

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The Bear was not alone. There were four others, strategic bombers all – two Badgers(Tu-16s) and two Blinkers(Tu-22s). Like the Bear, they were sneaking into Chinese airspace from different directions that very minute. The first Tu-16 had launched from the 444th Heavy Bombardment Wing at Spassk-Dalniy close to the China’s eastern border with the USSR and the second had scrambled from the 326th, Vozdvizhenka, a few hundred kms east of Spassk-Dalniy. The Blinkers had taken off from the 303rd at Zavitinsk in the Amur Oblast, directly north of the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator.

Like the Bear, the Badgers and the Blinkers too had passengers with deadly intent, devices that were considerably smaller in weight and yield – around 8 Megatons each. 8 Megatons isn’t puny exactly. 8 Megatons can wipe out a large metropolis like Mumbai and its suburbs.

Like Kuzkina Tetya, the others had names too. Sestra was going to hit a plutonium extraction facility in Guangyuanand. Dyadya would vaporize a warhead assembly plant at Harbin. Devushka would obliterate the Heiping Gas Diffusion Plant with it’s adjoining experimental reactor, while Babushka annihilated Chengdu, home of China’s gas centrifuges that spun at 30000 rpm, enriching uranium to 98% weapons-grade purity.

Hopefully, Babushka’s blast and fallout would lay waste to even the Chinese state-owned Chengdu Aircraft Industry which had painstakingly reverse-engineered the Chengdu J-7, a replica of the legendary Mig-21 jet fighter-interceptor, a squadron of which the Soviets themselves had gifted the Chinese just two years prior.

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And now about Kuzkina Tetya herself, the device that Col. Babayev and his crew were babysitting to target. It was a classic three-stage Teller–Ulam design, using a fission bomb primary to compress a thermonuclear secondary, as in most H-bombs, and then using the energy from the resulting explosion to compress a much larger third thermonuclear stage.

Tetya was not an identical twin to her elder sis, actually. Kuzkina Mat had only one third stage while Tetya had in total eight third stages, that would go off one behind the other, the intervals of course being in pico-seconds. It was going to be one big party for those frenzied neutrons.

Tetya would detonate in the atmosphere just as her predecessor had done, 2 miles above the earth, but that’s where the similarity would end…..

The 1961 detonation of Kuzkina Mat had a 58 Megaton yield. It been a test, planned over unpopulated Soviet territory, a barren ice-bound archipelago called Novaya Semlya, way above the Arctic Circle. Even then, concern over the fallout and the ecological damage to whole swathes of the Russian far north, had prompted the Soviets to install lead tampers at the second and third fusion stages.

The lead tampers restricted the flow of neutrons and thus inhibited both, her destructive power and radioactive fallout. They were kind of like a tranquilizer to a hyperactive kid suffering from ADHD. The inhibited detonation also gave the crew of the delivery bomber a fighting chance to get away far enough to be able to survive the shock wave.

In comparison, Kuzkina Tetya had a design yield of 105 Megatons and no lead tampers. It would explode over the heads of 12 million living, breathing souls going about their daily lives directly below, in one of the world’s most populous cities – China’s capital, Beijing.

Kuzkina Tetya did not need to be inhibited by lead tampers. She had U-238 fusion accelerators instead, that would do to the fusion reaction what anabolic steroids do to an athlete’s testosterone level. She was set to produce the same energy as a 500-meter asteroid slamming into the earth at 20 kms/second. To anyone with a seismometer within a 500 mile radius of ground zero, the resultant tremor would register 9.4 on the Richter scale.The energy released would be equal to 1.8% of the power output of the Sun.

All told, Tetya would be directly responsible for the deaths of 40-50 million Chinese, 12 million of whom, Beijing city folk, would be instantly vaporized, while the rest would die very slow and painful deaths from radiation sickness.

Tetya’s estimated yield of 105 megatons would equal the detonation of all the explosives that had ever been produced since 492AD, when a short beady-eyed Chinese alchemist discovered that saltpeter burned with explosive force and decided to find out if he could turn it into an offensive weapon, thus stumbling into gunpowder. 

I was just kidding about the short and beady-eyed. No one ever recorded what the alchemist looked like. Before he blew himself up.

Released from 42000 feet, Tetya was programmed to detonate the moment she fell through 11000 feet. It was not going to be a free fall. She would be slowed down by a massive 1½ ton parachute, in order to give the Bear hopefully sufficient time to make it to where it would not get knocked out of the sky by the shock-wave.

Not that that mattered. The Bear (and everything inside it), was expendable, a fact that Col. Anton Babayev and his crew knew well. It was a life they had chosen, drenched in adrenalin and patriotism.

A song hovered in the periphery of Babayev’s mind, one that his late father and his comrades used to sing as they scurried out into open ground between burnt-out shells of tenements in Stalingrad 1942, in order to draw fire so that the Wehrmacht sniper’s position would be revealed……

His chest swelling with pride, Babayev sang out as loudly as he could, “Rodina-Mat zovyot! Vse za Rodinu!” – The motherland calls! Everything for the motherland!