American Nukes

About Regulus

The weeds grow high, the trees edging in, and who knows how many Connecticut winters it has endured, a junked jet fighter, rusted and sinking into the mud out back, some gift by who knows who, who knows when, and too far gone to worry much about, too much to do and too little money to give this old thing much notice.

But Joe Milsap noticed. Milsap was there from the Vought Heritage Aircraft Foundation in Texas to make the final arrangements for the delivery of a Vought F6U Pirate fighter jet from the Connecticut Air Museum and Joe noticed the decrepit aircraft and knew it for the nuclear missile that it once was. The Regulus II was never deployed but it flew and it worked and it was made by the Chance Vought company and wow what a find.

The Connecticut museum donated the Regulus II to the retiree association and they restored it to its former beauty, now for all to see at the Frontier of Flight Museum at Dallas’ Love Field, its dark blue top and shining white bottom reflecting the wall of windows to its right.

The first Regulus, the Navy’s Regulus I, was the more beautiful, more accomplished cousin to the Army’s plain Jane Matador. Both looked like fighter jets but the more expensive (and so much better built) Regulus had numerous advantages over the Matador including a more advanced guidance system and, unlike the Matador, the Regulus had landing gear, just like a manned aircraft, that would deploy and the missile would touch down at an airstrip, ready to be flown again for further testing and training missions.

But the Regulus did not take off from airstrips. It took off primarily from one of the five submarines capable of firing the missile. They were often assigned to prowl the waters off the Kamchatka coast waiting for orders for Armageddon, the Soviet naval base along the coast perhaps the primary target. To fire the missile the sub would surface, prepare for launch, and then guide the missile via radio signal as it flew toward the Soviet naval complex near Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky or some other near-shore target, the submarine unmoving on the surface, exposed all the while.

The Regulus II was less of a revision of the Regulus than a new missile. It could fly on its own after launch, allowing the sub to submerge as quickly as possible, and its greater range allowed the sub to stay at a safer distance during the time that it was on the surface.

Neither the Regulus I nor the Regulus II were envisioned as long-term solutions. The development of the Polaris missile, which launched from a submerged sub, proceeded more quickly than expected and its arrival did away with the need for both Regulus models. In 1958 the Regulus II project, tested and flown but never deployed, was canceled, and a few years later the Regulus I was withdrawn from service. The leftover Regulus I and Regulus II missiles gained a new life, however brief, as target drones.

There are very few survivors left of either missile.

When they dug the old Regulus II out of the mud they were astonished to find that two of the tires were still inflated, another needing only a small patch. And when they got back to Texas they discovered that the landing gear, once it was attached to a power supply, still worked, as good as new after all of this time, after all of this neglect.

Gallery

Nukemap

NUKEMAP is a web-based mapping program that attempts to give the user a sense of the destructive power of nuclear weapons. It was created by Alex Wellerstein, a historian specializing in nuclear weapons (see his book on nuclear secrecy and his blog on nuclear weapons). The screenshot below shows the NUKEMAP output for this particular weapon. Click on the map to customize settings.

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