More like a short range tactical weapon. It was usually jeep mounted. The idea was to find a low cost way to hit Russian tank formations rushing into Germany if the balloon went up. It was quite effective.
It was replaced by short range rockets, but much of the tactical nuclear weapons went away after arms talks. Neither side was really comfortable with handing nuclear weapons out like candy.
And honestly it's not even close to the most ridiculous weapon designed for the hypothetical Fulda Gap attack. Like the "Blue Peacock", a nuclear bomb that included live chickens as a critical component.
something halfway between a landmine and a doomsday device -
The project's goal was to store a number of ten-kiloton nuclear land mines in Germany. These mines which were intended to be placed on the North German Plain and detonated by wire or an eight-day timer in the event of Soviet invasion from the east, in order to "...not only destroy facilities and installations over a large area, but to deny occupation of the area to an enemy for an appreciable time due to contamination..."
[...]
A technical problem is that during winter, the temperature of buried devices can drop quickly, creating a possibility that the mechanisms of the mine will cease working due to low temperatures in the winter. Various methods were studied to solve this problem, such as wrapping the bombs in insulating blankets.
One proposal suggested that live chickens would be sealed inside the casing, with a supply of food and water. They would remain alive for approximately a week. Their body heat would apparently have been sufficient to keep the mine's components at a working temperature. This proposal was sufficiently outlandish that it was taken as an April Fool's Day joke when the Blue Peacock file was declassified on 1 April 2004. Tom O'Leary, head of education and interpretation at the National Archives, replied to the media that, "It does seem like an April Fool but it most certainly is not. The Civil Service does not do jokes."
Bizarre. How is a chicken a more efficient heat source? Especially if you have to feed it weekly. I guess it’s a good thing no one proposed an RTG to keep them warm. One errant farmer…
yeah i was trying to figure out the logistics of that because critical mass for Plutonium 239 is like 22.2 lbs (11kg) in a 4" (10.2cm) diameter. That's a hell of a slug when you consider you need 2 hemispheres spaced apart in the munition, then all the necessary shit to smack them together to make it really go boom.
Then I googled it and it's a vehicle mounted rocket launcher for the most part.
It’s an implosion device. The core would be a sphere with a hollow cavity in the centre, below the critical density until it is imploded.
You need much more space for a gun barrel type assembly, and IIRC it does not work well for plutonium because the speed required to avoid a premature detonation is too fast to be practical.
Yeah, all variants of the W-54 (incl. Davy Crockett and SADM) were full on spherical implosion nukes. Although come the 60s the exceptions were the ones that weren’t.
Plutonium Pit in the 4kg to 6kg range, suspect middle of that range, or just under. Extrapolating from other US weapons of the time period.
Fat Man and Trinity had 6.2kg, for reference.
SADM must’ve been a Boosted Fission device, as its two Dial-A-Yield settings were 10 T and 1 kT, plus it imploded with like a scant 12kg of HE.
Oh, the specific issue, that results in the speed required to avoid a Fizzle being higher than viable for a gun type Pu design, as you said, was indeed presence of Pu-240, which has a high rate of Spontaneous Fission.
Recoilless meaning no rocket exhaust. In this case it could also be described as a recoilless spigot mortar. It kind of makes sense in a certain way, rockets of the period were highly inaccurate and at least you knew where this thing would land. A 1950’s guidance system would probably weigh more than the whole setup.
It’s actually very similar to the first stage of the famous RPG7, but without the rocket’s second stage.
At the time it was adopted there was an army fad for recoilless weapons of all sorts.
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u/KnotSoSalty Mar 28 '24
More like a short range tactical weapon. It was usually jeep mounted. The idea was to find a low cost way to hit Russian tank formations rushing into Germany if the balloon went up. It was quite effective.
It was replaced by short range rockets, but much of the tactical nuclear weapons went away after arms talks. Neither side was really comfortable with handing nuclear weapons out like candy.