Missions were a touch longer than that, but your point is solid: it was the first bomber with truly global reach. I’d say the B-2 is a better strategic bomber, but it’s so damned expensive that it really shouldn’t be risked until Armageddon, which really limits its utility. Certainly the B-52 has proven itself to be a phenomenally versatile airplane, and would be my vote in Ralph’s ‘best bomber ever’ thread.
As Shagnasty said, the B-52 was designed and built a long, long time ago.
Have the engines in them been retrofitted with more modern engines than they had back then?
Not yet. Maybe not at all:
–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress#Engines… emphasis added
Point of clarification about my previous post: This refers to the only B-52 left in the inventory, the “H” model. This aircraft was designed (in the 1960s) to use a newer turbofan engine (Pratt & Whitney TF33) than the original turbojet engine in the “G” and earlier models (P&W J57). But the TF33 is still a 50-year-old design, so the re-engining with a modern high-bypass turbofan (like used on modern military cargo planes and civilian airliners) would still be a technically viable idea. It appears the dispute comes down to cost effectiveness.
Military contracts sometimes come down to cost effectiveness. Just as often, it comes down to which congress-critter’s district the product comes from.
I truly don’t know which politician this points a finger at, but here’s an example. Our latest gee-whiz fighter plane’s contracts had parts made in nearly every state. The alternative engines for it continued to be paid for, years after the Pentagon said they didn’t need it.
If this post is judged to be political, I sincerely apologize.
Ha ha – yep, I remember the first time I did that, in a Piper Cherokee, in my very early days of flight training. I was up with a new instructor who probably had no idea I had never landed in a crosswind before, let alone a strong and gusty one. But a strong crosswind there was, so I just went ahead and did it. Was quite proud of myself. 
Slow? The U-2?
It was the fastest plane ever flown at the time, until the SR-71. It flew at 2/3rds the speed of sound, which was pretty good for the early 1950’s. They avoided early missiles by just flying faster & farther, so the missile just fell further & further back. Only after it had been in use for 5-6 years were missiles improved enough to catch one.
First flight for the U-2, per the wiki, was 1955. Wiki lists the top speed as 434 knots, which was comfortably exceeded by several prop planes by that time, never mind jets like the F-86.
The U-2 was really slow at its design altitude, if we’re looking at it as a margin over its stall speed. Then again, it could be really fast at times as a percentage of Mach. In Ben Rich’s memoir about the Skunk Works, he quotes a pilot saying that it was not unknown in tight turns at altitude to have the outside wing tip experiencing Mach buffet, while the inner wingtip was buffeting from an impending stall. The point being the flight envelope where the U-2/TR-1 did/does its work, is a narrow one.
It was far from being the fastest. Mach 0.66 is slow for a jet. The Gloster Meteor could do 0.82 the speed of sound and first flew in 1943. Talking with reference to the speed of sound is misleading though because the speed of sound varies with air density and reduces as you fly higher. Wiki gives the absolute max speeds of the Meteor and U-2S as 600 and 500 mph respectively. The F-86 Sabre could do nearly 700 mph and it was first flown in 1947. The ME-262 which first flew in 1941 could fly at 550 mph. By comparison, the U-2 was slow.
That’s also a bit misleading. It had a small margin above its stall speed because the stall speed increases as you go higher and the U-2 flew very high.