Some planes had jet engines just to look modern:
Officially it was an agricultural aircraft, but in fact it was designed for chemical warfare. I own an APU compressor and a turbine from this thing 
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True. But somehow things were easier back then, weren’t they? There was west and east, blue and red, good and bad. Nowadays it’s so much more complicated. Which is maybe the reason, why people with simple (albeit wrong) answers gain so much traction these days…
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Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
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A P-51 with a turbine engine was actually in competition with the A-10 for the ground attack role back in the day.
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Yeah it is pretty crazy we still use the B52, though I think they have updated the engines and part of the airframe since the 50s. The Bear just looks older because of its turbo prop design.
Though the US does have the B1 and B2 as far as more modern bombers go. And now thanks to the perfection of laser guided bombs, EVERY plane can be a bomber. The Rushes have their Tu-160 Blackjack which is similar to the B1.
And …
The thing to remember is, if you read reports about US (or NATO) aircraft intercepting Russian bombers, it means that an editor somewhere found it interesting.
If you don’t see it being reported on, it’s still happening, but it’s just not being considered newsworthy. They’ve been going on for almost 70 years, with a brief break in the 90’s up to 2007. (Good article about the history here, abit with a US bent).
Equally, although it’s not reported in the western press much, the US and NATO perform similar flights towards Russia (eg, eg2 eg3).
The weird bit is that some of the pilots are performing the exact same missions as their parents did 30-40-50 years ago, possibly intercepting the exact same aircraft (possibly crewed by descendants of the original crews).
Over all that time, no-one has shot anyone else, so it’s probably not worth getting worked up about.
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Well…
Ignore the onebox summary, there’s a fair few US/Soviet dust-ups in there.
Besides, I’ve seen Top Gun. I know what happens when you take the highway to the Danger Zone.
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Chess is a wargame.
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I think that when kicking around the country north of me as Paul Allen has his flying heritage collection up that way and have seen them in the sky a few times.
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You don’t need bombers to kill a country. We have learned in the past few years that all you need is facebook.
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Time is marching on my friend…
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Of course; the norm since the beginnings of The Cold War. Only this time it’s to Russia’s very obvious advantage to help a puppet US president stay in power.
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If you’re looking for something storied regarding northern sovereignty, check out the Canadian Rangers.
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Bah! We need a new thread!
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ISTR that before the U-2 was developed, the US used to overfly the Soviet Union with B-36 bombers to conduct photo reconaissance. I don’t know whether any were shot down, but one or two were shot up.
The RAF intercepted a couple of those in March
Good-looking planes, I don’t suppose that would be any consolation though.
