The Tornado was born in the immediate post-war years, when the arrival of the jet engine made every existing bomber suddenly look obsolete. The US Army Air Forces, soon to become the independent US Air Force, wanted jet bombers, and North American Aviation — already famous for the Mustang and the Sabre — produced the design that became the B-45.

The prototype XB-45 first flew in March 1947, and the aircraft entered service as the B-45A around 1948. It was the first jet bomber to serve operationally with the United States, a genuine milestone. Conventional in layout — straight wing, four podded jets, glazed nose — it nonetheless represented a decisive step from the piston-engined bombers of the Second World War into the jet age.

The B-45 was powered by four turbojet engines — early aircraft used Allison J35s, later ones the more powerful General Electric J47 — grouped two to a nacelle in two large pods slung beneath a straight, unswept wing. This arrangement was typical of first-generation jet thinking, before designers learned to bury or streamline engines for higher speed.

The straight wing gave the Tornado docile handling and a reasonable field performance, but it limited top speed and put a ceiling on how far the design could be developed. The whole configuration — sturdy, conventional and straightforward — reflected a bomber conceived at the very start of the jet era, when the swept wing and its dramatic performance gains were still being understood.

The Tornado carried a crew of four. Two pilots sat in tandem beneath a fighter-style bubble canopy at the top of the forward fuselage; a bombardier-navigator worked in the glazed nose, aiming the bombs and handling navigation; and a tail gunner sat in the extreme rear, operating a defensive gun position to fend off attacking fighters.

This layout — a glass nose for aiming and a manned tail gun for defence — was inherited from wartime bomber practice, and it marks the B-45 as a design straddling two eras. Later jet bombers would move away from the glazed nose and the manned tail turret as radar bombing and the sheer speed of jets changed how bombers were built and defended.

One of the Tornado’s defining distinctions is that it was the first American jet aircraft capable of carrying an atomic bomb. Adapting the B-45 to the nuclear role gave the US Air Force, for the first time, a jet-powered means of delivering the most powerful weapon in its arsenal — faster and higher than the piston-engined bombers that had held the mission until then.

This was a significant strategic step at the dawn of the nuclear standoff. It meant the deterrent no longer depended solely on propeller-driven aircraft, and it prefigured the jet-powered nuclear bomber force — the B-47 and B-52 — that would follow. For all that it was an interim type, the B-45 was a real pioneer of the airborne nuclear deterrent.

In 1952 nuclear-capable B-45A Tornados of the 47th Bombardment Wing were deployed to England, based at RAF Sculthorpe. This put a jet-borne American atomic strike capability within reach of targets in the Soviet Union and its allies, at a time of acute Cold War tension.

The deployment was strategically important: it demonstrated that the United States could position a jet nuclear-strike force forward, in Europe, ready to respond quickly in a crisis. The B-45s stood this nuclear alert in England for several years, a tangible part of the Western deterrent, until they were superseded by more capable aircraft as the decade went on.

The B-45 was always, in effect, a stopgap. Even as it entered service, Boeing was developing the B-47 Stratojet — a radically advanced swept-wing jet bomber with six engines, far higher speed, greater range and a much more modern design. The Stratojet represented the true shape of the jet bomber to come, and once it matured and entered service in quantity it made the straight-winged Tornado obsolete in the bomber role.

Rather than a failure, this makes the B-45 an important bridge. It let the Strategic Air Command gain real experience operating jet bombers — their maintenance, their tactics, their nuclear procedures — during the years it took to perfect the definitive design. The Tornado did the essential early work so that the B-47, and later the B-52, could carry it forward.

The most significant version of the Tornado was the RB-45C, a dedicated strategic reconnaissance aircraft. In place of the bomb load it carried a suite of cameras and other sensors for photographic and electronic reconnaissance, and it was fitted for in-flight refuelling, greatly extending its range for long-distance missions.

Only around thirty-three RB-45Cs were built, but they punched far above their numbers. In an era before reconnaissance satellites, gathering intelligence on the closed Soviet bloc meant flying aircraft to the edge of — and sometimes deep into — hostile airspace. The RB-45C was among the first jet aircraft the West had that could attempt such missions, and it took on some of the most secret and hazardous flying of the early Cold War.

The RB-45C’s most extraordinary missions were deep-penetration overflights of the Soviet Union itself. In the early 1950s, RB-45Cs are recorded as flying night reconnaissance sorties over Soviet territory to gather radar-scope photography and other intelligence — flights of great length and greater danger, deep over hostile ground with no prospect of help if things went wrong.

In a politically sensitive arrangement, some of these missions were flown not by American crews but by Royal Air Force crews, in RB-45Cs repainted with RAF markings, to give both governments a measure of deniability. These “Special Duty Flight” operations were kept secret for decades and remain only partly documented; the account here is deliberately cautious. What is clear is that they were among the boldest and most perilous reconnaissance missions of the whole Cold War.

The RB-45C also served in the Korean War, flying photographic and electronic reconnaissance over the peninsula. There it came up against the Soviet-built MiG-15, the swept-wing jet fighter that had come as such a shock to Western air forces, and RB-45Cs were involved in some of the early encounters between jet bombers and jet interceptors.

These meetings were sobering. Fast as it was, the straight-winged Tornado was no match for a MiG-15 in a fight, and the vulnerability of even a jet bomber to a modern fighter was made plain. The lesson — that reconnaissance would have to be flown ever higher and faster to survive — pointed directly towards the specialised high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft, and eventually the satellites, that would follow.

The Tornado was built in a small number of versions. Three XB-45 prototypes led to the main production bomber, the B-45A, of which around ninety-six were built; a small run of improved B-45Cs followed, with provision for wingtip fuel tanks and other refinements. The most important derivative was the RB-45C reconnaissance aircraft, of which about thirty-three were produced.

Across all versions only around 142 Tornados were built — a modest total that reflects the aircraft’s interim status. There was no sprawling family of sub-types as with longer-lived designs; the B-45’s variants trace a straight line from prototype to bomber to reconnaissance aircraft over a short but historically dense career.

As with most early Cold War military aircraft, there is no single reliable, transparent public figure for the B-45’s unit cost, cost per flight hour or total programme cost. It was procured in modest numbers in the late 1940s and early 1950s through government contracts rather than at a published list price, and consistent lifetime cost data for so short-lived a type is not available. Any single figure quoted for it should be treated with caution.

The Tornado was, moreover, a pioneering jet with demanding early engines and systems, which made it expensive to operate by the standards of the day — one reason the Air Force was keen to move to the more capable and efficient designs that followed. Rather than invent numbers, we list the cost fields here as “not reliably recorded.”

The Tornado entered service around 1948 and was largely gone from the front line by the late 1950s — a short career even by the fast-moving standards of early jet aviation. The reason was simple: it had been designed at the very beginning of the jet era, and the technology advanced so rapidly that it was overtaken almost at once.

The swept-wing Boeing B-47 Stratojet was a generational leap ahead in speed, range and capability, and once it was available in numbers there was little reason to keep the straight-winged B-45 in the bomber role. The reconnaissance RB-45Cs lasted a little longer, because their specialised mission had no immediate replacement, but they too gave way by the end of the 1950s to higher-flying successors. The B-45 was overtaken not because it was bad, but because it arrived at a moment of extraordinarily rapid change.

Because so few Tornados were built and the type was retired long ago, survivors are rare, and all are in the United States — fitting for an aircraft flown operationally only by the US Air Force. A small number are preserved in American museums, including at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Dayton, Ohio, and other collections.

These survivors are the last tangible reminders of a genuinely pioneering aircraft: the first American jet bomber, the first US jet to carry an atomic bomb, and the mount for some of the most daring reconnaissance flights of the Cold War. For a type that never sought fame and served only briefly, the preserved Tornados preserve an outsized piece of history.