TU4 BULL, B-29 Clone

THE PILGRIM · #1 10-13-2014, 07:46 PM

I did a thread the other day about the B-29 unit with the one way mission to Russia.
At the end of WWII you all know that we had the A bomb.
The Brits who participated in the Manhattan Project also had it.
The USSR who stole data from Los Alamos and England developed and exploded one.
We had the B-29 and we gave some to the Brits
The Ruskies? They asked for some B-29s but we refused. So they impounded some B-29s and didn't give them back.
The USSR then proceeded to reverse engineer the B-29. It was probably the most complicated and successful cloning effort ever. Not this just wasn't a one off effort. This was a full fledged production project.
The resulting aircraft was called the TU-4 BULL. It was used by the Soviets and later by the Chinese.
So at one point in time, three countries had the bomb. All very similar, US design.
They were all planning to deliver these A Bombs in B-29 / B-29 clones.
This would go a long ways to explain the extreme efforts such as the one way missions.
For you boys who haven't played in this area, the Russians are the most secretive and closed society on the planet. This now historic trivia would have probably not all been known at the time.
Remember, this was before U-2s and Satellites. This kind of stuff is in fact exactly why we developed the U-2 and other platforms.

Tupolev Tu-4 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

LVSteve · #2 10-13-2014, 09:43 PM

IIRC correctly Tupelov told Stalin that certain engineering features of the B-29 were overkill. Stalin, in typical fashion, reissued his order for an EXACT copy. The tapered thickness panels gave the Soviets fits as I understand it.

Coldshooter · #3 10-13-2014, 10:05 PM

The Book "World in Peril" which covers the 46th/72nd Reconnaissance Squadron has pictures of the TU4 taken by the Squadron in 1947 and it was known to be fully operational. The US F-13 modified recon version of the B-29 occasionally were bypassed by Soviet Fighters thinking they were other Russian AC. The Author also states that the first time a TU-4 was spotted the US crews thought it was a B-29 training flight out of Alaska and was possibly jeopardizing very classified missions. One of my former neighbors flew WB50 missions to the North Pole often on preselected routes.