US to create five new 'Doomsday' planes over fears out all-out nuclear war (2024)

The jets are designed to withstand the effects of an electromagnetic pulse (Image: Getty)

A US firm has purchased five former Korean Air passenger jets to reportedly turn them into nuclear 'Doomsday planes'.

The five Boeing 747 passenger jets were bought by the Sierra Nevada Corporation who were contracted with sourcing replacements for the US Air Force's fleet of strategic command and control military aircraft - or "Doomsday" planes – as they have been dubbed.

The jets are said to have the ability to essentially control all aspects of government from the sky should the ground be inhabitable, such as during a nuclear war.

Known as the E-4B "Nightwatch, the five planes were reportedly purchased at a cost of $675million.

The jets are designed to withstand the effects of an electromagnetic pulse, the burst of energy released by a nuclear explosion, according to the US Department of Homeland Security.

The five planes cost more than half a billion dollars (Image: Getty)

According to CNN, the Air Force claims at least one 'Doomsday plane' is on alert 24/7 at a US military base. Last month a chilling Cold War-era map predicted huge swathes of the US would be blanketed with radioactive fallout in a nuclear war.

Up to 75 percent of citizens living in the most severely affected fallout zones would be killed, according to the doomsday prediction. Although the Cold War is over, fears of a nuclear exchange have heightened in recent months following Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and military tension between Israel and Iran.

The US, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China all possess nukes, while Pakistan, India and North Korea have nuclear capabilities too.

Israel is also believed to possess the apocalyptic weapons but has never publicly admitted this. Meanwhile, Iran has a large uranium-enrichment program.

Scientists William Daugherty, Barbara Levi, and Frank Von Hippel, from the Institute of Medicine, published a paper in 1986 that examined the possible effects of a nuclear attack on the continental United States.

The three scientists theorized an enemy attack on the US's nuclear storage sites, including direct hits on the silos housing the Minuteman missiles - America's land-based nukes first developed in the 1950s - and causing them to explode on the spot.

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