This Boeing 747 doesn't carry passengers, nor is it a freighter plane... it carries a far more horrifying and deadly cargo of nuclear blastic weapons. With a capacity to fly across the ocean and disappear into the fog of war, this crazy cold war plan turned the 747 from a weapon of peace into a weapon of mass destruction, one that couldn't be beaten and if it had been built, would have been the ultimate Soviet deterrent.

During the cold war, the US military faced a challenge. It needed to keep its nuclear arsenal protected away from first strike from the soviets. It came up with three plans landbased sites would be hardered from a nearby strike, submarines would carry a nuclear arsenal under the sea, and the airforce would find a way to keep their own nuclear weapons out of sight of the enemy.

But finding a way to carry the latest and large nuclear missiles would be a challenge. The air force already had longrange bombers with the capacity to deliver nucleartipped weapons, but these aircraft were easy to intercept before launching their payload and would require plenty of protection in flight.

Thus they needed a new platform that could carry heavy nuclear weapons that could be deployed at a moment's notice perhaps still within the US airspace. A plane that could be parked at 1000s of airports across the country, and much like the nuclear submarine, vanish into the sky at a moment's notice and be untraceable by the soviets.

In 1973, Boeing offered the solution the Boeing 747.

Boeing would take its 747200 freighter plane, swap out the cargo and put in place several nuclear warheads. The design would have been able to carry two of the heaviest MX missiles or up to seven of the lightest.

To launch the missiles it would drop the missle out of the lower bomb bay doors in the aft compartment.

Parachutes would deploy on the rocket stabilize its fall and tilt the nose of the rocket upwards by 30 degrees. Eight seconds after falling out of the plane, the rocket would ignite. As the rocket still had the forward momentum from the 747 flying at cruise speed.

But the real ingenuity came from the layout inside of the plane.

For an aircraft carrying four ICBMs, the nukes would be loaded through the front cargo door and stacked side by side in the main fuselage cargo compartment, with the fourth nuke loaded in the readytolaunch position in the aft launch bay. A second missile would be brought from the main cargo section via a builtin overhead crane system and readied in position. This whole process would take around 35 minutes to reload and launch each missile.

The rest of the cabin of the plane would be taken up by crew facilities and the flight deck. The launch bay would be unpressurized, but the main cargo hold would be pressurized to allow the crew to inspect and maintain the missiles while in flight.

For the 747s that carried seven of the lighter versions of the MX missiles, they would be dropped from both the front of the plane and from the rear with separate doors for each. But this whole setup would require an extended front section by 125 inches.

The crew would be located on the upper deck behind the cockpit, with additional crew facilities loaded into the plane.

When the country was at peace, the aircraft would fly without any weapons onboard, performing training sorties and shuttling around to the many airports across the country. If the geopolitical situation got tense, it would land at a marshaling facility and load its payload taking about two hours to do so. The planes once loaded would fly to a almost random airport in the country with a runway of at least 6000 feet to await deployment. If things got really bad, then the planes would take to the skies and vanish into the countries airspace, or perhaps beyond. They were required to have a range of at leat 6,000 nautical miles fullloaded.

The aircraft were designed to remain in the air for 12 hours at a time, up to 24 hours with midair refueling before landing for servicing.

In the end, this design was passed in favor more accurate nuclear warheads based in hardened ground silos, submarines and strategic bombers like the B1 Lancer.

During the B1 Lancer development, defense contractors Orbital ATK and BAE, offered to have another crack at the 747 missile carrier as recently as 2005. The plane would be for a 747 carrying 32 or more missiles, each missile capable of launching a 2000pound JDAM weapon a range of 500 or more miles. In order to meet the required capacity, a fleet of 150 aircraft would be needed.

In the end, I'm personally kind of glad that the 747 never became a weapon of war and stayed as a peaceful civil alternative where the most explosive thing onboard is a shaken can of coke in turbulence.

Now if Airbus turned the A380 into a nuclear plane.... well that one I'll leave to your imagination in the comments!