Tu-95 Strategic Bomber

Dal’naya Aviatsiya

Irkutsk, USSR

Tuesday, August 19, 1969 – 02:15 hrs

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Before we go any further, a background first.

In the first 5-8 years after the Second World War, China and the USSR became close allies.

The balance wasn’t an equal one, though. China, then an underdeveloped agriculture-based nation, needed the Soviets more than the Soviets needed China. Had it not been for Soviet-supplied World War-2 surplus Il-2s, Mig-1s, Mig-3s and T-34 tanks, Mao-Tse-Dong would never have succeeded in banishing Chiang-Kai-Shek and his anti-communist nationalist forces to Taiwan.

In 1950, the two communist powers publicly demonstrated their closeness, when they signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. At its core, it was a security pact against foreign aggressions as well as an agreement for political, economic and diplomatic cooperation (aka assured Soviet economic aid).

With the signing of the new friendship treaty, Soviet largesse poured in, this time in the form of economic and military-industrial aid. Within a decade, the Chinese were making their own versions of Migs and Yaks.

Then, all of a sudden in 1953, just when the bromance was blossoming, Stalin died and Nikita Khrushchev, a vastly different personality, took over. Unlike Stalin, Khrushchev was a bit like an earlier version of Gorbachev – a peacenik-glasnost type, more Marxist than Stalinist.

When Khrushchev, in 1956, publicly denounced Stalin – an action once considered unthinkable – China’s Mao-Tse-Dong realized he could no longer take Soviet support for granted. The Khrushchev openness could infect Chinese politics as well and threaten his grip on power. Mao wanted to remain hardcore, with his absolute power and his Leninist scorched-earth ideology intact.

Mao’s growing antagonism was cemented in 1956, when the Soviets invaded Hungary to crush an anti-communist rebellion. Mao feared the same thing could happen to China. Helpless without sufficient military might, constantly pressured to obey Soviet dominance in the communist bloc and paranoid that the Soviets could invade China and annex it with ease, Mao began devising a long term plan that would maintain the USSR’s standing as an ally but ensure a partnership that was more equal. He announced the “Great Leap Forward”, a hurricane-speed action plan to modernize China from an agrarian to an industrial economy.

Turns out, Mao’s great leap was an unmitigated disaster. Having already purged the “intellectual class”, he had no brain power available to carry his megalomania forward. The pulling of manpower from the farms to the industry devastated China’s agricultural output, causing a famine the world had never witnessed. Millions starved to death.

Sensing the sudden Chinese coldness, the Soviets began to withdraw their industrial and military experts and aid to China reduced to a trickle. Along a parallel track, Khrushchev initiated a series of moves that would later come to be known as Détente, a period of relaxation of strained relations, with the US.

It was at this point that fate decided to take matters into its own hands once again.

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The 39-member Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the highest body of Soviet State Authority, removed Nikita Khrushchev. Obviously, like Mao, the members of the Presidium too thought that Khrushchev was moving the USSR toward too much openness, too quickly.

Unlike in earlier cases, Khrushchev’s life was spared. He was told to henceforth shut the fuck up and relegated to a comfortable dacha outside Moscow, to spend the rest of his life in retirement.

Once again a Stalin-like hardliner took over, a guy called Leonid Brezhnev, not as foaming-in-the-mouth as Mao but close enough. Bezhnev’s ascent however didn’t help to lessen Mao’s paranoia, since the Soviets decided to continue on with the détente process with the US.

The mutual mistrust between the Soviets and China gradually led to sporadic border skirmishes that flared up with increasing frequency, until it began to appear like the beginning of a much wider, possibly nuclear, Sino-Soviet war.

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Now that you have the back story, let’s continue with the flight of the Tu-95 Bear……

The passenger on board the Bear, Kuzkina Tetya, 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 – an H-Bomb 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. Kuzkina Mat 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, the Bear can fly us to the moon if she wants to. Here we go.”

(A Soviet pilot would never refer to his plane by it’s Nato call sign, in this case ‘Bear’ for the Tu-95. This is just a fictionalization of real events).

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° tilt until it leveled 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 similar in design to Tetya but 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!

(Watch out for Part-3)