Sometime around 1978, a silver Soviet bomber with a red star on its tail swept low past the American destroyer USS Hewitt, close enough for a Navy photographer to fill the frame with it. Scenes like that were routine for three decades. Wherever the US Navy sailed, sooner or later a Tupolev Tu-16 Badger came to have a look.

The Tu-16 took Soviet long-range aviation into the jet age. It carried the Soviet Union’s first air-dropped hydrogen bomb, fired some of the first anti-ship cruise missiles, fought in the Middle East, and was turned into an airliner. Russia retired it in the early 1990s. China never did.

Replacing a B-29 copy

At the end of the 1940s, the Soviet Union’s only long-range bomber was the Tupolev Tu-4, a reverse-engineered copy of the American B-29 Superfortress. Piston bombers were already looking vulnerable to jet fighters. What changed the picture was a new engine: Alexander Mikulin’s powerful AM-3 turbojet made a large jet bomber possible.

Tupolev’s bureau began work on “Aircraft 88” in 1950. The prototype first flew on 27 April 1952. It beat a rival design from Ilyushin and was approved for series production in December 1952, with three factories, at Kazan, Kuybyshev and Voronezh, eventually building it.

The result was a big, swept-wing bomber with its two AM-3s buried in the wing roots, a glazed navigator’s nose, a crew of six or seven and defensive 23 mm cannon in remote-controlled turrets and a manned tail turret. It could reach about 1,050 km/h and carry up to 9,000 kg of free-fall weapons, including the enormous FAB-9000 bomb or nuclear weapons. The first production bombers entered service in 1954, replacing the Tu-4.

The hydrogen bomb and the missile carriers

On 22 November 1955, a Tu-16 dropped RDS-37, the Soviet Union’s first two-stage thermonuclear weapon, over the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan. The yield was 1.6 megatons. It was the world’s first air-dropped multi-stage thermonuclear test.

The Badger was not, however, a true intercontinental bomber. Its range, about 7,200 km, was suited to targets in Europe and Asia rather than the United States. Its real future lay at sea. From the mid-1950s, Soviet Naval Aviation fitted Tu-16s with early cruise missiles: the Tu-16KS carried two KS-1 Komet missiles, aerodynamically similar to the MiG-15 fighter, intended above all for use against US aircraft carriers.

Archive footage of a Soviet Navy Tu-16 firing a KS-1 Komet anti-ship missile.

Later Badgers carried the larger K-10S and the KSR-2 and KSR-5 missiles. Others became reconnaissance aircraft, electronic-intelligence platforms, jammers, tankers and even a search-and-rescue version carrying a lifeboat. In all, around 1,500 Tu-16s were built in the Soviet Union between 1954 and the early 1960s. A civil derivative, the Tu-104, became Aeroflot’s first jet airliner.

Some of the conversions were ingenious. The early tanker version used a wingtip-to-wingtip method: the tanker trailed a hose from its right wingtip, the receiving Badger snagged it with a grapnel and winched it into a fitting in its own left wingtip. From 1963, the Tu-16N tanker switched to the probe-and-drogue system to refuel the supersonic Tu-22 and later the Tu-22M.

It was a recurring pattern. Whenever Soviet aviation needed a big, reliable jet airframe for a new job, the Badger was already there, already in squadron service and already paid for.

Shadowing the US Navy

For the Western navies, the Badger became a familiar face. Throughout the Cold War, Soviet Tu-16s probed NATO exercises and shadowed carrier groups, and American fighters routinely rose to escort them: F-8 Crusaders and F-4 Phantoms in the 1960s, F-14 Tomcats in the 1980s.

Some of those intercepted Badgers were not Soviet at all. In May 1969, during the NATO exercise Dawn Patrol in the Mediterranean, an F-8H Crusader of VF-13 escorted a Tu-16 wearing the markings of the Egyptian Air Force.

Combat in the Middle East

Egypt and Iraq were the Badger’s combat users. Egypt first used the type during the North Yemen civil war, then lost most of its Tu-16s on the ground to Israeli air strikes at the start of the Six-Day War in 1967. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Egyptian Tu-16s returned with bombs and Tu-16K missile carriers launching stand-off weapons.

Iraqi Tu-16s bombed Israel in 1967 and were later used in the long Iran-Iraq War, including raids on Tehran. Indonesia also bought the Badger, flying it during the confrontation with Malaysia in the 1960s. In the Soviet Union and then Russia, the type served until 1993.

A Cold War US Navy recognition film teaching sailors and aircrew how to identify the Soviet Badger.

The Chinese Badger

The Badger’s most remarkable chapter is still being written. Deliveries to China began in 1958, and the first Chinese-assembled Tu-16 flew in 1959. On 14 May 1965 a Chinese Tu-16 carried out China’s first airborne nuclear weapon test. After the Sino-Soviet split, Xi’an built its own copy, the Xian H-6, which first flew in fully domestic form in December 1968.

Modern versions such as the H-6K, with new Soloviev D-30KP turbofans, a redesigned nose and long-range cruise missiles, still form the backbone of the PLA Air Force bomber force. A nuclear variant, the H-6N, carries a large air-launched ballistic missile. Afterburner told that story in The Bomber That Refuses to Die.

That makes the Tu-16 design one of the longest-serving bomber airframes in the world, alongside the B-52 y el Tu-95. A preserved Tu-16R-2 still stands at the Central Air Force Museum at Monino, next to the Tu-4 it replaced.

Chinese state media footage of PLA Air Force H-6K bombers in training, the Tu-16’s modern descendants.

The Badger was built to give Stalin’s successors a jet bomber of their own. It ended up as a naval missile carrier, a Middle Eastern warplane, an airliner and the ancestor of China’s bomber fleet. More than seventy years after its first flight, the shape still flies.

Sources: Federation of American Scientists, Vintage Aviation News, Aerospaceweb, U.S. Navy, Central Air Force Museum Monino

Header photo: U.S. Navy photo / Wikimedia Commons, public domain