When the Northrop F-89 Scorpion First flew in 1948, it appeared every inch the jet-powered solution to America inauguring dread of Soviet bombers. The F-89 was designed with its twin engines, powerful radar, and ugly profile bristling with rockets to do one thing; protect North America against high-altitude, nuclear-tipped foes attacking across the Arctic. However, the history had different plans. The war it was designed to match never materialized and those that did, swift, mobile, guerrilla-type wars half a world away in jungles, found the Scorpion grounded, out of place and rapidly obsolete. But in some way, it also left a legacy that nobody expected.
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The Scorpion was conceived in the depths of the early Cold War, when military strategists thought that the next world war would be won by armada of Soviet bombers flying in waves over the North Pole. In response to this, the United States sprinted to create jet interceptors that could identify and annihilate enemy bombers before they could get to the cities of America. Then there was the F-89--heavy, all-weather interceptor, with one of the most sophisticated radar sets of the era and a load meant to rip up bomber formations at altitude.
However, impressive on paper though it was, the F-89 was beset with development problems. Its initial flights were bumpy, as it had structural issues, engine troubles and handling issues that made test pilots nightmare. Even when it came into service it was not reputed to be fast or agile. It lacked the ability to dogfight of the F-86 Sabre of the Korean War, and was by no means as pretty or as likely to survive. It was a lout--large, lumbering and packing a mouthful of rockets and, still later, air-to-air nuclear missiles.
Nuclear weapons, you read that correctly.
By the mid-1950s the F-89J variant was delivering the AIR-2 Genie, an unguided nuclear-tipped rocket. The idea was as terrible as it was simple- in the event that a formation of Soviet bombers was detected, the Scorpion would fire one of these nuclear rockets straight into the middle of them and then a massive explosion would be generated in the higher atmosphere so as to destroy them all at the same time. No need of pin-point accuracy. There was only a mushroom cloud that swept the skies. An extreme step against an extreme threat, and one, thank Heaven! which never needed to be carried into literal effect upon the field of battle.
This is where the story gets a twist though.
With the arrival of more capable and faster interceptors like the F-102 Delta Dagger and the F-106 Delta Dart to replace the Scorpion in front line units, the F-89 was not quite retired in a fake way. In fact, it did what no one expected it to do, it was the first and the only aircraft to drop a live nuclear rocket during a test over American soil. On 19 July 1957 an F-89J Scorpion launched a Genie rocket, containing a live warhead, over the Nevada Test Site. The result was an enormous air explosion and this revealed to anyone that nuclear air defense was not theory but was terrifyingly real.
By the 1960s the world of war had changed completely. The threat of mass bombers was eliminated, and it was replaced by the threat of ICBMs and unexpected nuclear missile attacks. Yet simultaneously smaller wars were being fought not in the sky above cities, but in jungles and desertswhere the unwieldy, radar-loaded Scorpion could have no role. Vietnam was threatening over the horizon and so was the era of the quick multi-role aircraft like the F-4 Phantom. Scores of vehicles like the Scorpion, built to wage war that never took place, faded into storage, training and finally museums.
But its history was one of the strangest in the history of aircraft. it was a machine which had been designed to operate in a particular nightmare, and which had then striven to live in a different world altogether. But rather than fade away like a bad dream it made an impression--a minute of high-altitude, nuclear-charged audacity that even the men who made it were appalled by.
The F-89 Scorpion never won a war, never even engaged in a war as it was designed to do. However, it helped the military to learn one useful lesson: even the most thoroughly thought-out weapons may be overtaken by the moving sands of history. But every now and then, even the most unpromising-looking aircraft can still make a difference- at least, as long as it keeps the game-changing radioactive moment or two in the sky.