Well, it was less important, since it was reasonably assumed that even dying crew would still try to reach the target. Disabling enemy bombs was more important.
That is incorrect. Nuclear AAMs where used to break up massed bomber formations and to account for inaccuracy in guidance systems. Nuclear poisoning is used but by ABM systems. Nuclear AAMs went away when bombers stopped flying in massed formations.
In the thin air on high altitude, the shockwave propagate less efficiently - and neutrons more efficiently. Also, the destruction of aircraft may cause more problems, because bombs could survive it. You see, USAF generals assumed that all Soviet nukes would have dead hand setting on their fuzes (i.e. if the plane got shot down, bombs would explode on impact). And since they were thinking about multi-megaton nukes... the fallout from massive ground explosion would be extremely devastating even if bomb fell short of target. So making bombs fizzle was actually a priority.
AIR-2 Genie did not have any guidance system, it was rocket, not missile.
Exactly... you needed a big boom to make up for the assured miss.
Then there's the joys of the "zombie troops"
Phooey... nothing left to shoot down wayward Constitution class starships.
Yes, one of the things radiation poisoning does is take down your immune system for a while. Makes you super vulnerable to infections you'd normally be able to fight off.
The issue is what's referred to as "Salvage Fuzing". The idea being that as you enter Enemy Territory you set up your weapons so that if you get shot down or crash short of the target, the weapons still detonate. Maybe you don't get the assigned target, but you have a serious Surface Burst, and a massive fallout trail. So - something you'd like to prevent, if at all possible.
Except that getting the bombers through the GCI net (When it was manual) was best done by sending in several streams of aircraft, separated by a minute or so, through a GCI sector at the same time, saturating the ability of the Weapons Controllers to process and direct the intercepts.
Exactly. That's why the focus was on killing the weapon as the highest priority, rather than just the bomber.
By late 1950s it wasn't manual anymore.
Which is why the Soviet bomber threat never evolved as originally expected. The prospect of Tu-95s and M-4s grinding their way South for hours after their initial detection and tracking, into the face of several thousand interceptors under positive control, and that a supersonic bomber capable of making the same run wasn't technically feasible, sent the Soviets looking in another direction, and spurred their Ballistic Missile efforts.
Maybe a 'drone fighter,' like the IM-99 BOMARC? Sort of a kamikaze fighter plane really...
By the mid-50's SAGE and Missile Master were online and growing systems in the US. They were interlinked and the prospect of a bomber force getting through to its target was shrinking rapidly. In the Soviet Union, Moscow had the S-25 Berkut system coming online that could effectively have shot down most of a couple hundred bomber raid trying to attack the city.
No, it just raised the definitions of "higher and faster" to Blackbird levels. Which are a very challenging intercept even when you know exactly the route they're flying. Not invulnerable, of course, but B70 Valkyries would have worked pretty well as strategic bombers.
Even there, SAM development would have gone there if the plane was more prevalent and could do more than take photos...
Soviets already had a SAM capable of getting there, the SA-5. But it was so expensive that the only place SA-5s were deployed was around Moscow.
There were well over 100 S-200 (SA-5 GAMMON) sites established in Russia. The systems that were only deployed around Moscow were their first SAM, the S-25 (SA-1 GUILD), and the Russian ABM system (1972 ABM treaty said you could protect either your capital or an ICBM field, IIRC).
There's some confusion over the SA-5. There were two missiles that ended up with this designation. The first was the DAL that became the V-1000 and that was a semi-ABM. Then you get the S-200 that was built in large numbers. DAL (aka V-400 and then V-500) and the V-1000 never really went into full production and only a few DAL were deployed around Leningrad. The DAL was superceded by the V-750 / SA-2 Guideline. The V-1000 was the Soviet Union's first attempt at a viable ABM.
S-25 Berkut was valiant (but almost futile) attempt to handle the problem of multi-channel simultaneous interceptions on early 1950s tech. To track several targets and missiles simultaneously, two fast-rotating antennas with overlapping beams were used; one tracked in azimuth, the other in elevation. Both needed to be perfectly synchronized, so each target could be scanned simultaneously in azimuth and elevation.
