A-4 Skyhawk og atombeskyttelse - Tyler Rogoway

"Scooter" på Andøya i 1973 - Bilder: Per Gram

TYLER ROGOWAYView Tyler Rogoway's Articles

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So much odd, but awesome tech came out of the Cold War. It seems like every day I find something new that is equally fascinating and alarming about an era when nuclear Armageddon seemed consistently immanent. The nimble little A-4 Skyhawk's clamshell thermal shield is a great example of this. 

The 'Scooter's' Thermal Anti-Radiation Heat Shield was fitted around the edges of the rear portion of its notoriously cozy cockpit during nuclear missions. The clamshell design could be pulled down, covering the pilot entirely, but allowing them to still see the instrument panel and access the flight controls. The system would not only keep the pilot from being blinded by the super-bright flash of a nuclear explosion, but it would also give them shielding against the high heat that resulted from it, and to a lesser extent, it would lower the overall amount of other forms of radiation the they would be exposed to.

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The shields were deployed operationally aboard aircraft carriers, along with tactical nuclear gravity bombs that the Skyhawks would haul into a combat zone and loft at targets before escaping the area as fast as possible. Lay-down and medium to high altitude dive bombing methods were also available, but less desirable, especially the latter. Here is a U.S. Navy video circa 1959 explain how the subsonic A-4 would use each of these methods to deliver a nuclear weapon:

The need to protect pilots from the bright and hot flashes of nuclear weapons detonations resulted in a variety of solutions throughout the Cold War. These included nuclear thermal curtains installed on aircraft like the B-52s and the Polarized Lead Zirconium Titanate (PLZT, pronounced "plizzit") flash blindness goggles introduced in the early 1980s for FB-111,b-52 KC-135, B-1, and eventually B-2 crews. Today, the B-2 uses a temporarily installed fast-tinting shield system mounted on its instrument panel dash that is based on technology originally developed for the B-1B to protect its crew during nuclear missions. You can read all about these wild contraptions in this past article of ours.