The bomber built to reach America — that couldn’t quite

What makes the M-4 Bison special

Myasishchev 3M Bison full specifications

Figures below are for the improved 3M; the earlier M-4 was slightly smaller and lighter. Many published values vary between sources and should be read as representative.

Baseline note: the figures below describe the 3MD of 1960 — the last, best-finished and shortest-lived bomber of the family, with four Dobrynin VD-7B in the wing roots, the lengthened pointed nose carrying the Rubin-1 radar and the in-flight refuelling probe, and six 23 mm AM-23 in three twin mountings. Deltas for the original M-4 of 1954 (Bison-A, Mikulin AM-3A engines), for the 3MS and 3MN production bombers of 1956–59 and for the VM-T Atlant transport conversion are given in grey. Four cautions apply before a single number below is quoted. First, the NATO names do not map onto the Soviet ones the way most English tables imply: M-4 is Bison-A, the 3M, 3MS and 3MN are all Bison-B, and only the 3MD is Bison-C, so a page that calls the whole 3M line Bison-C is wrong. Second, the two families are different aeroplanes, not marks of one: the 3M has a wing of greater span and area, a lighter structure, one crew station fewer in the redesigned nose and an empty weight some three tonnes below the M-4, so mixing M-4 and 3M rows in one column produces an aircraft that never existed. Third, published range figures for this type are a minefield — the same table will print a with-refuelling ferry figure beside an unrefuelled combat figure without saying which is which, and the whole point of the aeroplane turns on that distinction. Fourth, production totals genuinely disagree: 93, 116, 123 and 125 all appear in reputable sources, and the arithmetic that reconciles them is set out in the variants section below.

Armament & payload

The M-4 could lift twice the bomb load of a Tu-95, and the only weapon that ever mattered was one hydrogen bomb it could not deliver and come home

On paper the offensive fit was the best in Soviet service: a 24-tonne maximum load on the M-4, a bomb bay long enough for stores of 500 to 9,000 kg, naval mines, and a defensive battery of six 23 mm cannon in three twin mountings covering the whole sphere — where the Tu-95 had a blind cone below the nose and the B-52 had nothing but a tail turret. The primary weapon was the thermonuclear izdeliye 37D of about three megatons, with the earlier RDS-series fission bombs of 20 to 60 kilotonnes as the alternative. None of it was ever used. Neither the M-4 nor the 3M dropped a weapon in anger, and the only nuclear releases were test drops over Novaya Zemlya.

The gun fit deserves its reputation and its scepticism in equal measure. Three remotely aimed twin mountings with a spherical field of fire was genuinely advanced for 1954, and the ammunition supply — 1,100 rounds each for the dorsal and ventral mountings and 2,000 for the tail — was generous. But the whole scheme was sized against interceptors carrying half-inch guns and unguided rockets with a firing range of about a kilometre. By the time the fleet was operational it was facing F-102s and F-104s, Bomarc and Nike, and the calculation had already been lost. The Soviet answer everywhere else was to hang a stand-off missile on the bomber; the Bison never got one, and that failure decided how the political and military leadership thought about the aircraft for the rest of its life.

What the airframe did carry, in the end, was fuel for other people’s aeroplanes. From 1958 the surviving M-4s became M-4-2 tankers, and through the 1970s and 1980s most of the 3M fleet followed as 3MS-2 and 3MN-2. Fits varied sharply by mark and by role: early M-4s are credited in some sources with as many as nine NR-23 in a larger set of mountings, later aircraft standardised on six AM-23 in three; and every tanker conversion had its guns, sights and bombing gear stripped out entirely, so a photograph of a Bison proves very little about what that particular airframe was carrying.

Sourcing caveat: weapon nomenclature for this aircraft comes almost entirely from Russian-language monograph literature — Moroz, Yakubovich, Rigmant, the Aviatsiya i Vremya and Aviakollektsiya articles — and from Gordon’s Red Star volume in English. Ammunition loads, the early NR-23 fit and the exact composition of the nuclear inventory carried by squadron aircraft differ between them; where they conflict, both figures are given above rather than an average. Nothing here is drawn from Cold War Western estimates, which were wrong about this aeroplane for over a decade.

Variants

Myasishchev built a bomber that could not reach America, and the Soviet Union spent the next forty years finding better uses for it

The line divides cleanly. Two prototypes and 32 production M-4s were built at Plant No. 23 at Fili in 1954–56, and they were not good enough: short of range, short of reliability, and grounded fleet-wide for more than a year in 1958 after a run of accidents. Then came 74 production 3Ms in 1956–59 with a new wing, a lighter structure and better engines, split between 3MS with old Mikulin engines and 3MN with new Dobrynin ones according to what Ufa could deliver, and finally ten 3MDs in 1960. Total output at Fili is given as 123 or 125 aircraft including prototypes; 116 entered service; the frequently quoted figure of 93 counts only part of the family and should be treated with care.

The record of that service is harsh and worth stating plainly. Of the 116 aircraft that reached the units, 27 were lost in accidents and crashes, with at least three more destroyed before delivery — a quarter of the whole fleet. Nearly 63 per cent of those losses were M-4s. The pitch-up on take-off, the narrow band of acceptable landing attitudes, the booster failures, the burst tyres and the fires were all real, and at Engels in the 1950s the wives of the aircrew walked onto the airfield and stopped flying. Yet crews who flew the 3M for years speak of it with affection as a light, sweet-handling aeroplane, and every one of those problems belonged to the first decade rather than the last.

The most famous thing about the family happened on the ground and in Washington. At the Soviet Aviation Day display at Tushino in July 1955, American observers counted what they took to be 28 Bisons in two groups. The standard account, and the one repeated in both Western and Russian sources, is that ten aircraft flew past, went out of sight, turned and came back with eight more, so that the same ten were counted twice. What is documented beyond argument is the count, the extrapolation from it — the CIA reckoning on some 800 Bisons by 1960, and NIE 11-4-57 predicting 150 to 250 by 1958 and over 600 by the mid-1960s — and the consequence, a "bomber gap" that helped buy thousands of B-47s and B-52s. What is not documented is a Soviet order to stage the deception: no published directive shows intent, and historians differ over whether Tushino was a trick or simply a rehearsed programme flown by everything available. U-2 flights from 1956 and satellite imagery from 1960 dismantled the estimate; the West went on mistaking the 3M for the M-4 until about 1961.

"M" / izdeliye 25 and "DM" (1953–54, 2 built plus a static airframe)

Prototypes. The first flew from Zhukovsky on 20 January 1953 under Fyodor Opadchy, without brake parachute, most of the armament or the rearing mechanism. The second, "DM", was a metre shorter, lighter and fully equipped, and flew in January 1954.

M-4 (Bison-A, 1954–56, 32 built)

The production bomber: four AM-3A, glazed nose bombardier station, 24-tonne maximum load. Shown over Red Square on May Day 1954 — a single prototype, not the eighteen aircraft some English sources claim — and first delivered to Engels on 28 February 1955.

M-4-2 (M-4-II) (from 1958, most survivors)

Tanker conversion with the Konus hose-drum unit and transfer tanks in the bomb bay. After the 1958 grounding it was decided to convert every M-4 still in the line; conversion was reversible in principle, and the tankers formed two squadrons nicknamed "Normandie" at Šiauliai and "Bats" at Ukrainka.

3M / 3MS-1 / 3MN-1 (Bison-B, 1956–59, 74 built)

The real aeroplane: new wing of greater span and area, three tonnes lighter, radar moved to the nose, refuelling probe standard from the fifteenth batch. 3MS-1 with RD-3M-500A, 3MN-1 with de-rated VD-7B; the suffixes stand simply for "old engines" and "new engines". Prototype flown by Mark Gallai on 27 March 1956, a flight that very nearly ended in a stall on climb-out.

3MD (Bison-C, 1959–60, 9 or 10 built)

The refined bomber: lengthened pointed nose with Rubin-1 radar and probe, modernised wing, smaller rudder, Svod-Vstrecha navigation, and pylons under the wing roots for two K-14 missiles that were never delivered. The best-looking of the family; the units called them "dandies" and used them as commanders’ aircraft.

3ME (1959–60, 1 converted)

High-altitude missile carrier with revised avionics, autopilot AP-15 and Rubin-1, converted from a production 3M. Flown thirteen times, then destroyed on the ground at Zhukovsky when the M-50 prototype broke its chocks during an engine run and rammed it.

3MS-2 and 3MN-2 (1962–early 1980s, most of the 3M fleet)

Tanker conversions of the 3MS and 3MN, done at repair plant No. 360 at Ryazan. Brezhnev promised Ford twenty conversions with the probes removed and the bomb bay riveted over; most conversions in fact retained the possibility of reversal. Up to 40,000 kg transferred per sortie, and until the American KC-10 appeared these were the most capable tankers in the world.

3MR / 3M-5 (1964 and 1973–75)

3MR, the long-range maritime reconnaissance version taken on by naval aviation in 1964. 3M-5, one aircraft rebuilt as a carrier for the KSR-5 missile with new sights, jammers and secure communications; state trials passed in 1975, no production ordered.

VM-T Atlant (3M-T) (1979–1990, 2 flown from 3MN-2 tankers plus 1 static airframe)

The outsize-cargo conversion for the Energia and Buran programme, when the An-124 was not yet ready and slinging loads under Mi-26s had proved lethal. The rear fuselage was replaced by a new section 4.7 m longer, angled upward to clear the runway; the swept fin gave way to twin endplate fins on a new straight tailplane of much greater area and dihedral, to survive the buffet that had troubled the Boeing 747 Shuttle carrier; the wing, cabin and bicycle main gear were untouched, the outriggers rebuilt for the higher loads. Four loads: the Buran airframe without its fin at 45.3 tonnes, the Energia hydrogen tank at 31.5 tonnes and 7.78 m in diameter on a fuselage 3.5 m across, the oxygen tank assembly, and a returning fairing container. Maximum lift-to-drag fell by 30 to 35 per cent. The name came from repainting the 3 of "3M-T" into a V after a security officer objected to a bomber designation on an Aeroflot-liveried aircraft.

Projects (none built)

M-29 / M-6P airliner for 80 to 200 passengers and its military transport version; 3M-A with two nuclear turbojets and a reactor in the bomb bay; 3M-M flying boat refuelled at sea by submarine, with a claimed 25,000 km on two refuellings; 3MP and 3M-T convertible tanker schemes; the "MK" Kh-20 carrier. All died with OKB-23, which was dissolved in 1960 and handed to Chelomei’s missile work.

Disposition: the type is extinct in service. The 3M bombers were cut up in the first half of the 1980s in a scrapping campaign presented as arms reduction, the surviving 3MDs being spared and mothballed near Engels; the tankers flew on past the end of the country that built them, and the last flight by any aircraft of the family was a 3MN-2 ferried from Ryazan to Engels by Major V. Gur on 21 March 1994. The remainder were broken up under post-Cold War arms-limitation agreements — the START-era cuts rather than a single treaty clause, and the mid-1980s cull that preceded them. Four original airframes are usually listed as surviving: 3MD "30 Red" (c/n 6302831) at the Central Air Force Museum, Monino; M-4 "60 Red" (c/n 0301804) at the Long Range Aviation museum at Dyagilevo, Ryazan; M-4 "63 Red" (c/n 5301518) at Ukrainka in Amur Oblast; and 3MS-2 "14 Red" (c/n 7300805) at Engels-2. A further airframe is now displayed at the UMMC museum complex at Verkhnyaya Pyshma in the Urals. Both flying VM-T Atlants survive as well: one at the 360th aircraft repair plant airfield at Dyagilevo, preserved and stored indefinitely, and one at the Myasishchev EMZ at Zhukovsky, which was rolled out for the static park at the MAKS shows of 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2021. There are no reproductions and no flyable examples; every aircraft listed above is an original airframe.

From intercontinental hope to shuttle-carrier

Twelve stories about the M-4 Bison

The Bison in pictures

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Where the Bison flew

The record that defines it

The M-4 Bison never dropped a bomb in anger. It was a strategic-deterrent aircraft, and its story is one of capability and perception rather than air-to-air combat. Its significance lies in three things: it was the Soviet Union’s first four-jet strategic bomber; it fell short of the intercontinental range its mission demanded, and so was largely re-tasked as a tanker; and it briefly frightened the West into believing in a bomber fleet that did not exist. Every one of its roughly 93 airframes served a single operator — the USSR.

Compare the combat record of every military aircraft. Figures as of July 2026.

Everything people ask about the M-4 Bison

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Every fact, checked

• GlobalSecurity.org — Myasishchev M-4 / 3M MolotDevelopment, range shortfall, tanker conversion and production numbers.
• GlobalSecurity.org — 3M-T / VM-T AtlantThe Buran and Energia transport role, twin-tail conversion and flight tally.
• Buran-Energia.com — VM-T Atlant descriptionDetailed account of the shuttle-carrier conversion and its delivery flights.
• The Aviation Geek Club — The 1955 Bison flypastThe Tushino deception and the American “bomber gap” response.
• Plane Historia — Myasishchev M-4Service history, variants and the four decades of Bison operations.
• MilitaryFactory — Myasishchev M-4 (Bison)Specification baseline, dimensions and engine data.
• The National Interest — The M-4 BisonThe strategic-disappointment narrative and the bomber-gap context.
• National Museum of the US Air ForceReference for Cold War Soviet strategic bomber context.