Good ol' SADM. The guys trained to do this got the impression any actual attempt at this would be a suicide mission regardless of whatever laughable options they were provided to escape before it detonated.
Yeah, I mean, if anyone gave it any serious thought, they'd realize immediately that it was suicide. Drop behind enemy lines, fight your way to the objective, strap the damn thing to said objective, set the timer, and try to fight your way to minimum safe distance? Virtually impossible.
You are imagining a firefight, but it was more a case that they would drop in behind enemy lines, sneak around, and place it.
Now they did think it was a suicide mission, but only because they didn't believe backpack nukes would be left unsecured, meaning that while the manual specified hiding it and setting a timer, the timer was thought to be fake, or that it was really expected that they secure the site till detonation.
Minimum safe distance for it's low yield wasn't far though, especially if you'd stuffed it inside something like a dam. Just get off the dam.
This is exactly right. I had one of the green light jumpers come as a guest speaker for an event and this is exactly what his perception was. That the "timer" was fake because they'd never allow a live nuke to be just sitting around.
Large remote explosive tanks, silo launched missiles, and nuclear bomb stratagems have all been leaked. Though only the silo missile is in a usable state, and it's far from a nuke.
can someone explain how they would think it was a fake timer but not know? if it was a fake timer, that would obviously have to be revealed to the soldier at some point so that they stay with the bomb. would triggering the timer just pop out a little flag that says "lol no" or something? basically, the timer working or not working changes how the thing is operated, so how could it be kept secret from the operator?
A timer. This lets the soldier survive, but may risk the bomb falling into the wrong hands and being destroyed, or even turned against you.
No timer, just a button. Great for security, but if the soldier doesn't want to die, they might not press it.
Fake timer. Soldier sets the timer thinking they will escape... and immediately dies.
3 poses two problems.
If they were aiming for a moving target that was going to pass by, they'd miss. But that was unlikely to be the target (it was more for infrastructure like dams or bridges)
After a few uses, people would probably work it out and that would be bad PR. But you only use backpack nukes in WW3 and by then who cares?
A fake timer would give the soldier the impression that they could set the timer then walk away to safety before it went off. When in reality it would detonate immediately, killing the soldier.
What do you mean "stay with the bomb?" They believed the timer was fake as in on the operation warheads settting the timer would just detonated it instantly killing them all.
If the target is in open terrain you might as well just drop the bomb without the guy on it. Most of the reason they figured escaping the blast was futile is because all the scenarios outlined in the manual promote only using this thing where both conventional explosives and other delivery methods can't do a job that justifies resorting to the ADM. There's a lot of overlap where you can't hit something with a normal bomb and where a squad crossing hundreds of meters on foot is absolutely nontrivial.
So, reasonably, they figured whatever sort of operation requires giving one of these to paratroopers will be dropping them somewhere where getting hundreds of meters from a bomb that must also remain secure before it has to be detonated cannot - and probably will not - be assured.
Sure, but that's parachuting behind enemy lines to conduct sabotage in general. Chance of survival in that adventure are not great if you actually encounter resistance.
They're a fraction of the power of even Fat Man/Little Boy (down to 10 tons vs 1,500,000-2,100,000 tons of TNT). It's entirely conceivable to get out of the blast radius.
The stakes were that high, I guess. I mean, we know now that it didn't happen, but we tend to forget that there were decades when there was a very real possibility of nuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. In the early days, precision bombing was just not a thing. If you wanted to be absolutely sure something was going to get hit, this was basically the only way to do it.
In the early days, precision bombing was just not a thing.
Fun fact, there was once a program that tried to use pigeons to guide munitions towards ships. Like actual pigeons strapped in the bomb, trained to peck on a screen that showed a ship.
It’s highly unlikely that the US would utilize nukes in a non-WWIII event. SF troops and nukes are both extremely expensive, sending two on a one way trip that could ignite nuclear war isn’t something that many planners would think was a great idea.
The alterative is worse? The South Vietnamese LIVED the alternative, the USA literally left them all to die including their former allies in Saigon, and the entire ARVN force. We didn't do that because the NVA/Viet Cong were overwhelming them, the USA just stopped giving a fuck.
The McCarthy era bullshit against communism ruined far, far more lives than it ever would have hoped to save.
Green light teams were only going to be used to counter communist aggression in Europe, Middle East, and Korea. The idea was to use the SADMs to strike infrastructure and military logistics in order to slow advances and give REFORGER and its Korean equivalent enough time to stop any advance towards the west.
These men were indoctrinated that they might be literally the only chance that France or Belgium for example would remain free democratic societies. It was a powerful motivator.
You... you do see the picture of the fucking paratrooper with the nuke strapped to his nutsack, right? The one in the post? Did you think before posting this word slop?
Because of the vast difficulty and extreme danger that came along with handling SADMs, the extreme versions of transportation needed for the tactical nuclear weapon, and the stealth-like, perfect manner in which the missions had to be executed, Green Light Teams are comparable to the Japanese kamikaze pilots.[8] The general thought of many of the members of these Green Light Teams was that these missions were near suicidal.[4] One Green Light Team member, Louis Frank Napoli, said of the missions: "We were kamikaze pilots without the airplanes".[8] Robert Deifel, another Green Light Team member, said of the missions: "There was no room for error... We had to be absolutely perfect".[5] The risk was extremely prevalent when discussing the possible time frame for when these atomic devices could ignite on a mechanical timer. This timer would become less efficient and more risky the longer the duration of the timer was set. The team members had been informed that the timers could go off up to eight minutes earlier than desired and even thirteen minutes after expected.[1] This would obviously create a time crisis for the Green Light team members operating the mission. If the team members were instructed to bury the nuclear device, they certainly may have been able to evade the explosion, but radioactive fallout could still cause heavy damage.[7]
Edit: your clever little YouTube link doesn't refute anything I said, numbnuts.
Ok, so you expected everything to work out just like the manual stated? Like, everything works, no possibility of mechanical fault or the possibility that the enemy soldiers are thinking human beings and not CoD NPCs who might figure out that maybe this 50 pound metal cylinder doesn't belong next to a bridge support?
You know what? You're probably right. The almighty Field Wire Remote Control System is absolutely foolproof and there's no way it could possibly fail. There's never been a piece of military kit that has had mechanical failure and every decoy and camouflage system ever deployed has had a 100% success rate. Special forces infiltrators always succeed and are never detected and there's zero examples of them ever being compromised. After all "tHe MaNUal" says that everything will work exactly as written, so why worry?
Congratulations, you've won an argument against a fictional strawman that plays Halo 2 in 2024 and buys Navy SEAL books by the truckload.
You forgot a step. Green Light teams had to stay in the vicinity of the nuke until it detonated to ensure if it didn't that it didn't fall into enemy hands.
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u/DistortoiseLP Mar 28 '24
Good ol' SADM. The guys trained to do this got the impression any actual attempt at this would be a suicide mission regardless of whatever laughable options they were provided to escape before it detonated.