R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
So, anyway, from Wikipedia:
B-52 strikes were an important part of Operation Desert Storm. . . . a flight of B-52Gs flew from Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, refueled in the air enroute, struck targets in Iraq, and returned home – a journey of 35 hours and 14,000 miles (23,000 km) round trip. It set a record for the longest-distance combat mission, breaking the record previously held by an RAF Vulcan bomber in 1982; however, this was achieved using forward refueling.[9][194] . . . B-52Gs operating from the King Abdullah Air Base at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, RAF Fairford in the United Kingdom, Morón Air Base, Spain, and the island of Diego Garcia in the British Indian Ocean Territory flew bombing missions over Iraq . . . In August 2007, a B-52H ferrying AGM-129[s] . . . from Minot Air Force Base to Barksdale Air Force Base for dismantling was mistakenly loaded . . . [218][219] Four of 18 B-52Hs from Barksdale Air Force Base were retired . . at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.[220]
. . . B-52s are periodically refurbished at USAF maintenance depots such as Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma.[223] On 9 April 2016, an undisclosed number of B-52s arrived at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, part of the military intervention against ISIL. T as a platform to test a Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) missile.[239] . . .In late October 2022, ABC News reported that the USAF intended to deploy six B-52s at RAAF Tindal in Australia in the near future, which would include building provisions to handle the aircraft.[240]
I'm mainly familiar with Actor-Network Theory from Bruno Latour vanishing up his own butt in Aramis, or, The Love of Technology, and considering that I've never taken a serious crack at the book, that might be grossly unfair. The thing is, this
"Actor–network theory (ANT) is a theoretical and methodological approach to social theory where everything in the social and natural worlds exists in constantly shifting networks of relationships. It posits that nothing exists outside those relationships. All the factors involved in a social situation are on the same level, and thus there are no external social forces beyond what and how the network participants interact at present. Thus, objects, ideas, processes, and any other relevant factors are seen as just as important in creating social situations as humans"
sounds like the kind of academic bafflegab too easily reduced to the kind of cynical nihilism that makes everything about politics. And then you realise that, never mind never-built new paradigms of subway transit being characters in their own sociological studies, the B-52 doesn't exist. (Except as the mediator of a network of relationships between the natural, technological, and social worlds.)
On Christmas Eve, 1952, the "Handley Page 80," now christened the Handley Page Victor, was released from the Secret List. And doesn't Correlli Barnett look pretty much how you imagined him? That is the face of a Tory lout. For all that he has been the bete noire of my literary life, today is the first time I have ever looked at his Wikipedia page, and so it is news to me that he did his national service as a sergeant in the Intelligence during the Palestine Emergency.
It figures. (On the other hand, he was right, and I was wrong, about the Gulf War, and I have warmed to his description of the invidious role of coal mining in the history of the British economy.) Today, we are on about the shots so blatantly fired by E. S. Stafford against the B-52, as he explains that the advantage of the Victor's crescent sweep wing is that straight swept wings "cannot be used except at very low aspect ratio owing to poor stalling qualities, [and] would look like a Christmas tree with engines and fuel tanks hanging from the wing, and the undercarriage, like a child's scooter, taking up all the useful space in the fuselage. Such a design would be impossibly heavy and out of the running as a long range bomber. As the figures show, practicable wing thickness at a high Mach number can be achieved if combined with [compound, or crescent] sweep." (The Engineer, 9 January 1953 [Vol. 195, N. 5059], 57.)