It’s not a toy, it’s an instrument of mass death.
The B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is a first-strike weapon designed to penetrate the air-cover surrounding a target and drop a massive conventional bomb, or a cluster of nuclear weapons. Out of the black, in the dead of night, the B-2 announces its presence when the explosions begin, or there’s a blinding flash and a moment of utter silence before the shockwave comes. It’s a product of America’s best and brightest, made at tremendous expense and with great secrecy.
It’s hard to understand how America justifies weapons like the B-2. The justification is easy: it’s for defense. What’s hard is how anyone believes that. You don’t defensively sneak up on someone and drop unexpected death on them – that’s “offense” not “defense.” The twisted logic of American imperialism is that anything that might restrain us is an attack against us. Anything that might counter-balance our globe-spanning power is a preparation for aggression. So, if some country builds an air defense grid to keep other nations’ military aircraft from freely overflying their airspace, that is an offensive move if you’re the US, and you expect to be able to freely overfly anyone’s airspace, at any time, with nuclear-capable bombers. We just saw a demonstration of this logic in Korea, recently, in which the US’ ageing fleet of B-1 Lancer bombers engaged in an “exercise” – i.e.: practice run, for flying a decapitation strike against North Korea. You know, North Korea, the pariah state populated with weirdos who act like the US is constantly ready and practicing how to kill their leaders with a single strike? Those weirdo North Koreans got the message that the B-1s were supposed to send, loud and clear. It’s the people who somehow saw a test-run for a first strike as a “defensive” maneuver, who did not get the message.
Donald Trump famously wouldn’t know a nuclear triad if someone hit his golf cart with it, so he exemplifies the great American people, who have been thoroughly duped by the lies of the “defense” apparatus. I know you understand, if you’re here and reading this, that the “triad” is a left-over of the cold war, in which the idea was to maintain a counter-strike capability that could not be obliterated by a first strike. At the height of the cold war, the US kept B-52 bombers in the air 24/7 (carrying H-bombs) so that in the event someone was stupid enough to strike the US, the bombers could not be hurt. They would be able to carry out their mission of nihilistic revenge even if the US homeland was a shattered wreck. But the bombers were just one leg of the triad; the other two were the missiles in the silos and the ballistic missile subs under the water. The thinking was that nobody could obliterate all three legs of the triad simultaneously and the surviving legs would provide a holocaust of retaliation. Those of us who actually think about these things realize pretty quickly that the bombers were never necessary; the other two legs were sufficient, and for purposes of retaliation they could be 1/10 or less their current size.
Let me give you an example: England. 24 H-bombs would be all you’d need to literally bomb England back to the time when they erected Stonehenge, including killing nearly half of the people on the island. That’s quite a deterrent. A single US ballistic missile sub carries 8 times that bomb-load: 24 missiles carrying 8 warheads each. A single US ballistic missile sub can turn all of Russia into a wasteland. That’s quite a deterrent. But we have many times that, and the missiles in their silos, besides. But those are not first-strike weapons. The big ballistic missiles aren’t stealthy because they’re a counter-strike: they’re the message of death from the dead hand of America, which is presumably already burning and destroyed.
The stuff that scares everyone is the offensive weapons. Those are the stealth bombers like the B-2, which appear over a target and obliterate it, like the squall-front of a horrible storm that follows right behind. The B-2 is the weapon that destroys the target’s ability to fight back, so it can’t retaliate. In simple terms, the B-2’s job is to punch you in the face so hard you’re unable to resist the bulldozer that runs you over a few seconds later. The US freaks out when anyone builds first-strike weapons that might work against us, because for all that we talk about peace and deterrent, what we’re really doing with all these weapons is positioning ourselves so that we can “win” a nuclear war against anyone. Smart people in the 60s and 70s asked the question “what does ‘winning’ a nuclear war even mean?” and they didn’t come up with any good answers, other than something Conan the Barbarian would recognize. Because of the nature of nuclear retaliation and balance of terror, the only nuclear war that is victorious is one where you genocide your enemy, unscathed. Anything less is unacceptable. So, the B-2 (and now the new hyper-precise stealthy cruise missiles the US is developing) are not there to keep someone else from winning a nuclear war: they’re so we can win a first strike against anyone.
What should freak us all out with boggled terror is how obliviously foolish our fellow Americans are about this stuff. These weapons are the opening notes in a symphony that ends with “the living shall envy the dead” – limitless tears and open-ended tragedy. We as a civilization are so depraved that we think these weapons are entertaining. In fact, we place our children in their path, like some kind of innocent sacrifices to Moloch.
In the picture above, it would normally be night when the B-2 would come drop its bomb-load. You can listen to it, how quiet it is. In the parts of the world America holds in contempt, people do not gather in the streets like this, because the hellfire missiles may come and they may all wind up a statistic in some CIA scorecard, marked down as “insurgents.”
But now I have to get to what really pisses me off: there is no escaping the flat fact that military aircraft are dangerous to have around. And some nationalist goon thought it would be a good idea to have a stealth bomber fly over some crowded suburban area, at near stall speed, to – what? Maybe the idea was to show a bunch of happy people what the state has in store for them? A long-range bomber like a B-2 is a flying fuel tank with space for carrying weapons and a small space for pilots. And every so often, some air show ends in fire and pain when a military jet goes out of control and disassembles itself into the now burning audience. Because I track F-35 and jump-jet failures (also the Osprey) I am painfully conscious of air show crashes, in which a military aircraft augers into the audience, breaks apart, and sets a bunch of people on fire.
Shoreham: 7 dead [cnn]
Madrid, 2013
If you watch the death-wing you can tell it’s wobbling a bit because it’s just hanging at the edge of stall speed. It’s also in seagull country: the pilot would have under 1 second to react if one of the plane’s engines ingested a bird and failed. I’m sure the pilot knows what they are doing, but so did the other pilots at other air shows. The difference is that, instead of being a bunch of people in a field expecting to see military aircraft doing dangerous things, this appears to be a city street.
The Shoreham crash (below) the plane landed in a parking zone and splashed burning fuel on everything. This is not a thing you want to contemplate happening to a suburban street full of people, with residents and businesses. But someone approved the B-2 flyover, because Americans are so in love with their own subjection, that they see these weapons as toys.
Shoreham
The worst air show crash, so far, was in Ukraine, when an SU-27 bounced and exploded right in the audience. 77 people were killed and over 500 wounded.
These things are weapons, not toys.
Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man’s tools.
He uses them only when he has no choice.
Peace and quiet are dear to his heart.
And victory no cause for rejoicing.
If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing;
If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself.
– Lao Tze, Chapter 31 [link]
I suspect Lao Tze would have bitter words for someone who sees the weapons of war as toys for tots.
There was a time when for a while, after the fall of the Berlin wall and perestryoika when I stopped worrying about nuclear war. But then I was already worrying about climae change, so one way or another I’ve been worrying about humans making the planet unihabitable for us for a while. The Tories confirmation of the renewal of Trident, in a time when austerity was being imposed on all other areas of spending was just sickening.
Jazzlet@#1:
The Tories confirmation of the renewal of Trident, in a time when austerity was being imposed on all other areas of spending was just sickening.
It’s hard to know which of those sort of things are pushed by America, or pulled by our vassal countries. Although, as I have mentioned before, Trident to the UK amounts to open proliferation of intercontinental ballistic missiles and attached warheads. That’s something the US makes dire threats about, when anyone but us attempts it.
I got almost exactly this view of one of these things about ten years ago, at an airshow. In the UK.
Think about that for a moment.
If it hasn’t sunk in, here’s what the US taxpayer sprung for that day:
– a pilot and copilot to make a subsonic flight from the B2 base in Missouri
– refuel over the Atlantic
– flyby the airshow ONCE in a straight line
– out over the North Sea to refuel again
– fly back across the Atlantic, refuelling AGAIN
– landing at the same base about 17 hours after they took off
– three refueling tankers in the air in the right places at the right times – pilots, copilots, etc. plus obviously fuel load
– FOUR F-15s as escorts “to make it show up on radar” (maintaining the fiction these 1980s aircraft are transparent to modern detection systems). Pilots again, and fuel for them too. I’m assuming they swapped escorts mid-Atlantic instead of risking inflight refuelling. Who knows/cares? Cost difference is minimal.
So thanks, US taxpayers. It was the dullest part of the show.
I think the wobble is to maintain its path along the main road. I also think you’d be surprised how slow the stall speed is – it is not a plane optimised for speed, because you don’t need to be fast if nobody knows you’re there.
Also, while the pilot knows exactly what they’re doing, they’re not doing much of what any light-aircraft pilot would recognise as piloting. They’re certainly not actually doing anything as crude as “flying the aircraft”. Humans have about as much chance of doing that as they do of controlling the relative speeds of the four rotors on a DJI Phantom manually in real time to cause it to hover. The B2 more than most winged aircraft is only flyable via a computer, and you can bet whatever you like that in the event of a bird strike the pilot’s only concern will be a dialogue box that comes up that says something like “Bird strike detected. Engine 1 shut down. Return to base? {Y}/{N}?”.
“this appears to be a city street.”
Specifically, this appears to be the Tournament of Roses parade in downtown Pasadena, CA. Note the pink line down the center of Colorado Blvd in your first still, and the rose banners on the street light poles.
This is an event routinely attended by 1-2 million people.
To me, that looks like a lazy but well controlled flight, and the jitters are camera artifacts. I do admit I was crazy enough to attend navy airshows in Moffett Field back when I lived in Silicon Valley and it was still operational, so maybe my judgement is off on this though.
In particular there are parts of Colorado Blvd in old-town Pasadena that have that many pedestrians on a normal day (although not the section we are looking at in this clip, which is not as pedestrianized) There are x shaped crosswalks where all traffic stops and briefly you can hear all the people talking etc. during a normal day.
The humans that are sounding quite bright and loud on this recording? You would not hear these humans over the sound of traffic. If that B2 were flying over Pasadena and was higher, nobody would have a clue. I guess I intellectually knew that the machine was quiet, but this video makes just how quiet it is seem extremely scary. Because I have personal experience of just what that street and the people of Pasadena sound like, it was GODSDAMN SCARY. I believe this was very much intentional. The video seems benign on the face of it, its the Rose Parade! Colorful flowers! But the massive cost of it is justified, propaganda wise.
Did you hear we recently held a “thanksgiving” service at Westminster Abbey to mark 50 years of the UK’s nuclear deterrent? It was not particularly well received… https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48149055
Oh yeah, when a B2 flies over at 1000 ft, you can barely hear it. And it’s not a low level bomber… (those things tend to be fast)
Nothing in this comment takes away from your points, but the aircraft in the 2013 Madrid crash was a 50s-era jet trainer (HA-200), and he crash itself was almost certainly the result of pilot error in performing a loop maneuver. The photo bearing the caption “Madrid 2013” is not from that event, but rather seems to be from the 2011 crash of a highly-modified (and apparently poorly-maintained) P-51D at the Reno National Championship Air Races.
I’m slightly reminded of Charles Stross’s Dark State, where some people are setting up an alternate timeline U.S., and decide to name different departments the “Ministry of Propaganda” and “Ministry of Warfare” for the sake of honesty…
I grew up in the tail end of the cold war, so while I missed the really tense bits, I still remember being a child and being absolutely terrified at the idea of a nuclear war. I’m less bothered by orange asshole not knowing all three components of the nuclear triad (we all know he’s a willfully ignorant moron), but more at his question as to why we aren’t using our nukes…
A few years back I was attempting to be minimally social, and was hanging out with some people when the Blue Angels(?) were flying about San Francisco. Sure, it was impressive, I guess, but I couldn’t help but see it at best, as a colossal waste of talent, resources, and money. And all for some nationalistic chest thumping. I guess it’s not as showy, but I’d rather nix the airshows, and live in a country that doesn’t have shantytowns under every overpass.
I remember reading this: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/william-langewiesche-b-2-stealth-bomber/561719/
Martin Veneroso@#8:
Nothing in this comment takes away from your points, but the aircraft in the 2013 Madrid crash was a 50s-era jet trainer (HA-200), and he crash itself was almost certainly the result of pilot error in performing a loop maneuver. The photo bearing the caption “Madrid 2013” is not from that event, but rather seems to be from the 2011 crash of a highly-modified (and apparently poorly-maintained) P-51D at the Reno National Championship Air Races.
You’re right – I got the wrong caption from the image on google image search. What’s annoying is that I am actually more familiar with the Reno incident than the Madrid crash.
The pilots who crash planes at air shows are often “the best and brightest” (or, “the best” until they aren’t) – I don’t think it matters if it’s pilot error, maintenance error, or just damn luck; doing flyovers of built-up urban areas is inviting disaster.
Military parades exist for propaganda and intimidation purposes. Even when somebody starts talking some bullshit about honoring the soldiers, that’s still the same crap, because “publicly honoring the soldiers” is propaganda. Thus I strongly dislike military parades even when they aren’t flying airplanes and risking accidentally killing some onlookers.
sonofrojblake said: Oh yeah, when a B2 flies over at 1000 ft, you can barely hear it. And it’s not a low level bomber… (those things tend to be fast)
This needs to be qualified. I used to have a sailboat on Narragansett Bay (Rhode Island). I was out one day when there was an airshow at nearby Quonset (the one where the eponymous “hut” was developed).
A B-2, part of the airshow, flew directly over my masthead, probably at 1000′ or less — I could easily make out the details of the underside.
Sure enough, it was quite silent… until it had passed me. Then it was one of the loudest things I’d ever heard. Obviously if it had reached that position, nobody cared a bit whether you could hear it or not; it was far too late.
That was one of the scariest experiences in my life.
My favorite example is a swedish JAS 39 Gripen that stalled and crashed in central Stockholm at the 1993 Stockholm water festival, luckily into a spot not full of people (only one woman was seriously injured): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkgShfxTzmo
This was one of the first planes which was aerodynamically unstable and needed a computer to fly, and it seems they were still figuring out how process the input from the pilot. This crash and an earlier one by same test pilot were said to be due to “pilot-induced instability”.
Before that we had the horrible crash at the Ramstein air show in Germany in 1989, with ~60 dead.
starblue@#14:
My favorite example is a swedish JAS 39 Gripen that stalled and crashed in central Stockholm at the 1993 Stockholm water festival
I never heard of that one! Looks like he was doing stall turns when he lost it. You can see that he hit the “eject!” as fast as he realized something was wrong – at that altitude you have, basically, no time to think at all.
The sight of clouds of burning jet fuel over a city – that’s what I do not want to see. Why do people insist on teasing the fates like this? They do not like being teased and they can call on the Demon Murphy to come do his thing any time…
And there was Rammstein.
If I may say, the monument to the Stockholm crash is elegant, beautiful, clever, and very Swedish:
Love that monument.
If you think being behind a B2 is loud, try a B1. That is the loudest sound I have ever heard. It physically hurt even with my fingers in my ears and the thi g must have been 500 metres away at least.
DonDueed@#13:
A B-2, part of the airshow, flew directly over my masthead, probably at 1000′ or less — I could easily make out the details of the underside.
I’m sure military flyovers cause accidents on highways, etc. Including “accidents” like I’d have in my pants if that happened. Being near that much energy is dangerous.
When I was a kid in the south of France one summer, a low-flying Dassault Mystere nearly hit a kite I was flying. It was a big 6-foot delta wing and I had it at the end of a long spool of linen twine. I always wondered whether the pilot had an “oh, shit” moment.
Come to think of it, the first time an airshow plane ingests a drone, I suppose airshows will be a thing of the past.
I went to the airshow at Frederick airport back in 2002 or so. It was pretty cool until the pilot of an F-14 started spooling up the engines while the plane was pointing its rear arc toward the extended end of the audience zone. You could see people figuring out what was about to happen, and dropping things and running. I imagine that there was a lot of hearing damage done that moment. My companion and I were a few hundred yards away and it was mind-bendingly loud.
Right. Just like computer programming these days. Developers no longer do any programming, they just push a few buttons to make software like “Java” or “Python” write all the machine language code that’s executed by the CPU.