https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stUIyfa4aQc
The WS-125 was an American super long-range strategic bomber project during the Cold War to develop a nuclear-powered aircraft.In 1954, the United States Air Force (USAF) issued a weapons system requirement for a nuclear-powered bomber, designated WS-125. In 1956, General Electric teamed up with Convair (X211 program) and Pratt & Whitney with Lockheed in competitive engine/airframe development to address the requirement.In 1956, the USAF decided that the proposed WS-125 bomber was unfeasible as an operational strategic aircraft. Finally, after spending more than $1 billion, the project was canceled on March 28, 1961.Two different theoretical ideas for achieving this were produced. The first of these, championed by General Electric, was called “direct cycle”. In this design, air would be channeled directly into the reactor, passing through a series of tubes where it would be super-heated and then fed into the engine nozzle. The second method was called “indirect cycle”. Developed by Pratt & Whitney, this proposed engine would pull the incoming air into an isolated reaction chamber that was entirely separate from the nuclear core, where heat exchangers would drive the atmospheric gas to high temperatures and expel it to produce thrust.Two General Electric J87 turbofan engines were successfully powered to nearly full thrust using two shielded reactors. Two experimental engines complete with reactor systems (HTRE-3 and HTRE-1, which was modified and renamed HTRE-2) are located at the EBR-1 facility south of the Idaho National Laboratory. As of 2022 the reactors are still on display there.Although it was not yet clear which engine concept—if any—would be workable, the Air Force went ahead with a “request for proposals” christened the WS-125, which was taken up by Convair, the manufacturer of the B-36, and by Lockheed. The WS-125 was to have a single atomic power plant in the back of the fuselage running two jet engines, one on either side. The crew would be up front in a shielded cockpit, and several nuclear bombs would be nestled inside the forward fuselage. Each flight made by the new bomber would be limited only by the length of time that the crew could stand being aboard, and each plane could go for months or even years before its uranium reactor fuel began to run out. To make refueling quick and easy, the entire reactor-engine unit was planned to be modular, allowing the whole assembly to be quickly removed and replaced. The super-bomber was intended for deployment in the early 1960s.But the project was already in trouble. The Air Force could never solve the most basic problem of all: safety. The Navy could put nuclear reactors on its submarines and surface ships because they spent nearly all their time out at sea, and if there would happen to be an accident the whole mess would simply sink to the bottom of the ocean and present no danger to populated areas. But a nuclear-powered aircraft would of necessity have to fly virtually anywhere to air bases all over the world—and therefore could potentially crash anywhere, including near or in populated areas. The very idea of a crash in a friendly foreign country that permanently contaminated a large inhabited land area was enough to make the hair of American politicians and Air Force Generals turn white, and there was no way to avoid the risk over the long term.At the same time, by 1956, new developments were making that danger less and less necessary: the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile was nearing deployment, and it was assumed by many that the strategic bomber would simply disappear and the US bomber force would be replaced with “silo sitters”. On the technical front, moreover, things were lagging: General Electric had come up with a working model of their direct-cycle nuclear engine, but the thrust it produced was far less than expected. Pratt & Whitney, meanwhile, could not get their indirect-cycle engines to work at all. The Air Force ended all effort on the WS-125 airframe until a reliable nuclear engine was available. President Eisenhower was already considering an end to the whole project.After the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, American researchers were stunned to discover that while the 1958 Aviation Week story was a fake, the USSR had indeed developed and flown a nuclear-powered aircraft, beginning in 1961 and running to 1969. The way they had done it was, in typical Soviet fashion, both crude and brutal. After producing a rudimentary but functional direct-cycle nuclear-powered jet engine, they modified a Tupolev “Bear” long-range bomber to carry it—unshielded. During each of the 40 test flights, the crew was irradiated, and the airplane spewed out a trail of radioactive fallout as it flew. Most of the two test crews were already dead by the time the Soviet Union fell and the program was revealed.
