Early today, the Barents Sea NATO patrolling area was visited again by Russia. This time it was a marathon outing for the bears. No less than 8 TU-95MS Bears were reported to have been intercepted.
Norway scrambled F-16s as per their procedures in order to guard their airspace. As the Russian aircraft proceeded towards UK airspace, the RAF scrambled the QRA Tornado F-3s, 2 jets from RAF Leeming in North Yorkshire and 2 more from RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire.
Obviously, 8 Bears is a large number of aircraft to be intercepting and they potentially represent 25 Megatons of nuclear weapons in the form of KH-55 ALCMs. The intercept sortie was successful and the Bears did not enter UK airspace.
During the cold war, the TU-95s would fly a constant nuclear patrol around the Arctic circle region. Apparently, the aircraft would be given designated targets and would proceed towards those targets until called back by radio. I understand that if no radio signal was received, the system was to ‘fail-deadly’ and complete the mutual destruction of both sides assuming a first strike by NATO forces.
Whether the Bears we see today are carrying out a similar nuclear patrol remains somewhat unclear.
It appears though, that my postulation that the Typhoon F2s of XI squadron sent to intercept the last Bear we saw was in fact just a photo-op may have been correct. Today’s intercept was carried out exclusively by Tornado F3s.
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