I was deep down a late-night research rabbit hole recently, looking into some of the wildest engineering projects in aviation history, and my mind is honestly still spinning. As someone who spends most of his time analyzing the future of humanoid robots and AI agents, looking back at the sheer, unfiltered madness of 1950s technology is a trip.

I always thought I understood the limits of extreme engineering, but then I stumbled onto the Convair NB-36H.

They didn't just design this on paper. They actually strapped a live, fully operational nuclear reactor into the bomb bay of a massive aircraft and flew it.

The idea behind it was both brilliant and utterly terrifying. During the Cold War, military strategists were obsessed with infinite range. They wanted a sky monster that could stay airborne for weeks, or even years, without ever needing to land for fuel.

Here is what absolutely blew my mind while reading the declassified specs:

The Shielding Hack: Instead of shielding the massive reactor (which would be too heavy to fly), they decided to just shield the crew. They built an 11-ton cockpit lined with lead and specialized rubber just to keep the pilots from being cooked by gamma radiation mid-flight.

The Success: It actually worked. Between 1955 and 1957, this radioactive beast completed 47 test flights over Texas and New Mexico.

The "Flying Chernobyl" Reality: This is where the project eventually died. Engineers realized a horrifying truth—what happens if the plane crashes? Or gets shot down? It wouldn't just be an aviation tragedy; it would be a flying Chernobyl disaster, raining radioactive contamination across civilian populations.

When I sat down at my computer to write about this, I realized how incredibly lucky we are that sanity prevailed and they grounded the project. But with modern micro-reactors and deep-space nuclear propulsion making a massive comeback today, it makes you wonder if that old ambition is truly dead.

If you want to dive deeper into the insane technical specs and the full story of this airborne reactor, I put together a much more detailed breakdown on the site. You can read my full article here:

Read the full story: The Terrifying Reality of Flying Nuclear Bombers