It had a range of up to 110 nautical miles (200 km; 130 mi), and was intended to allow US Air Force strategic bombers to penetrate Soviet airspace by neutralizing surface-to-air missile defenses.

The Hound Dog served the dual purpose of attacking defense sites as well as being a stand-off missile to use against strategic targets so that the bombers did not have to approach them.

SRAM had an inertial navigation system as well as a radar altimeter which enabled the missile to be launched in either a semi-ballistic or terrain-following flight path.

[4] The SRAM missile was completely coated with 0.8 in (2.0 cm) of soft rubber, used to absorb radar energy and also dissipate heat during flight.

Various plans for alternative guidance schemes, including an anti-radar seeker for use against air defense installations and even a possible air-to-air missile version, came to nothing.

A new weapon, the AGM-131 SRAM II, began development in 1981, intended to arm the resurrected B-1B, but it was cancelled in 1991 by President George Bush, along with most of the U.S. Strategic Modernization effort (including Peacekeeper Mobile (Rail) Garrison, Midgetman small ICBM and Minuteman III modernization) in an effort by the U.S. to ease nuclear pressure on the disintegrating Soviet Union.

In June 1990, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered the missiles removed from bombers on alert pending a safety inquiry.

[5][6] A decade earlier in September 1980, A B-52H on alert status at Grand Forks AFB in northeastern North Dakota experienced a wing fire that burned for three hours, fanned by evening winds of 26 mph (42 km/h).

Eight years later, weapons expert Roger Batzel testified to a closed U.S. Senate hearing that a change of wind direction could have led to a conventional explosion and a widespread scattering of radioactive plutonium.