The interception of Soviet bombers was a major military preoccupation of the late 1940s and 1950s. The revelation in 1947 that the Soviet Union had produced a reverse-engineered copy of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the Tupolev Tu-4 (NATO reporting name 'Bull'), which could reach the continental United States in a one-way attack, followed by the Soviets developing the atomic bomb in 1949, produced considerable anxiety.
The World War II-vintage fighter armament of machine guns and cannon were inadequate to stop attacks by massed formations of high-speed bombers. Firing large volleys of unguided rockets into bomber formations was not much better, and true air-to-air missiles were in their infancy. In 1954 Douglas Aircraft began a program to investigate the possibility of a
nuclear-armed air-to-air weapon. To ensure simplicity and reliability, the weapon would be unguided, the large blast radius making accuracy mostly irrelevant.
Timestream Exploration 
