U.S. deploys B-52 bomber to Korean Peninsula

The B-52 bomber, dubbed "The Emperor of bombers," is one of the strategic weapons that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un fears about the most. The bomber has made stately appearance for the first time in about three years after maneuvering into the Korean Peninsula in March 2013 soon after the North’s third nuclear test, and participated in a mock bombing drill to send open warnings to Pyongyang.

The ultra large bomber, which measures 49 meters long, 56 meters wide, and weighs 221 tons, is an old-fashioned bomber whose production was completed in the 1960s. A total of 744 B-52 bombers were produced, but only about 70 plus units of the B-52 H aircraft, an improved model, are currently under deployment at Anderson Air Base in Guam and the U.S. mainland.

Unlike its image as an old-fashioned, and longest serving bomber, the B-52 is the strongest strategic bomber in today’s world. The U.S. considers B-52 bombers, inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM), and submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM) as the "Triad system” for transporting nuclear weapons.

The B-52 is a long-distance bomber that can fly up to 6,400 kilometers at the top speed of up to 960 kilometers per hour, and launch bombing before returning. The bomber can load up to 31 tons of bombs, including nuclear missiles. Notably, the AGM-86 air-to-surface cruise missile loaded with a nuclear warhead can make precision strikes onto North Korea’s surface command facilities from a distance of 2,500 kilometers. The fire power amounts to 200 kilotons (1 kilotons amounts to explosion of 1000 tons of TNT). This translates into 13 times the power of the nuclear bomb that hit Hiroshima (15 kilotons). A total of 80 B-52 bombers were deployed at the Gulf War in 1991, and blanketed 25,000 tons of bombs, or about 40 percent of the bombs the allied forces dropped in the war, and confirmed its overwhelming power.

It takes about four to six hours, depending on the volume of loads, for a B-52 to fly from Anderson Air Base in Guam to the Korean Peninsula. Since the airplane is already capable of conducting precision strikes from a long distance even without flying into the Korean Peninsula, and can use the "bunker buster" that can completely destroys an underground bunker where North Korean leader Kim Jung Un could be hiding, the North Korean military feels dreaded. “If three to four B-52 bombers concurrently launch carpet bombing, Pyongyang will disappear from the map,” a South Korean military source said. “We cannot confirm which weapons the bomber carried in this time around.”

The North’s official Rodong Shinmun newspaper said, “They conduct drills in which strategic nuclear bombers directly fly into the skies of the Korean Peninsula from the U.S. mainland or Guam through nonstop flights and drop nuclear bombs as many as several times per year,” in indirectly expressing a sense of fear.

hjson@donga.com