Northrop B-2 Spirit
bomber aircraft family manufactured by Northrop
The Northrop B-2 Spirit is an American nuclear-capable subsonic stealth strategic bomber, often referred to as a "stealth bomber", solely operated by the United States Air Force. A four-engined flying wing and lambda wing with a crew of two to three, it is designed with stealth technology to penetrate sophisticated air defenses.
The B-2 was designed by Northrop (later Northrop Grumman) as the prime contractor, with Boeing, Hughes Aircraft Company, and Vought as principal subcontractors. It was produced from 1988 to 2000. The bomber can drop conventional and thermonuclear weapons, such as up to eighty 500-pound class (230 kg) Mk 82 JDAM GPS-guided bombs, or sixteen 400 kiloton B61 nuclear bombs. The B-2 is the only acknowledged in-service aircraft that can carry large air-to-surface standoff weapons in a stealth configuration.
Development began in 1979, as the Advanced Technology Bomber (ATB) black project during the Carter administration. Its promises contributed to cancelling the Mach 2-capable B-1A bomber, but development difficulties delayed progress and drove up costs. By 1996, the program produced 21 B-2s at a total cost of $44.7 billion (equivalent to $91,820,000,000 in 2025) or average cost of $2.13 billion (equivalent to $4,370,000,000 in 2025) per aircraft, including procurement, development, testing, and production. The megaproject's considerable capital and operating costs made it controversial in the U.S. Congress, even before the end of the Cold War dramatically reduced the desire for a stealth aircraft to strike deep inside the Soviet Union; by the 1990s lawmakers shrank the planned purchase of 132 bombers to 21.
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This entry incorporates text from “Northrop B-2 Spirit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.