Nothing seemed out of the ordinary 50 years ago when Air Force Capt. John M. Haug and his crew took off in a B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs.
It was the height of the Cold War, the era of “Dr. Strangelove.” The Stratofortress departed Plattsburgh Air Base in Upstate New York on Jan. 21, part of an ongoing airborne alert program under the Strategic Air Command and satirized by Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic, subtitled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” The mission had a name the film’s Gen. Buck Turgidson would have endorsed with a grin, “Operation Chrome Dome,” but there was nothing humorous about the underlying rationale.
