M388 Recoiless Nuclear Rifle from 1962 - portable Armageddon
The M388 Recoiless Nuclear Rifle came with a .01 kiloton nuclear warhead and fired it up to 3 miles.
Fortunately it never was used as the range of the nuclear fallout included the soldiers who fired it.
We are lucky to have just missed an age of portable nuclear weaponry. Note in the video the soldiers being brushed down with brooms to presumably remove nuclear fallout!
One of the smallest nuclear weapons ever built, the Davy Crockett was developed in the late 1950s for use against Soviet troops in West Germany.
Small teams of the Atomic Battle Group (charged with operating the device) would be stationed every few kilometers to guard against Soviet attack, using the power of their nuclear artillery shells to kill or incapacitate advancing troop formations and irradiate the area so that it was uninhabitable for up to 48 hours, long enough to mobilize NATO forces.
The W54 warhead used on the Davy Crockett weighed just 51 pounds and was the smallest and lightest fission bomb (implosion type) ever deployed by the United States, with a variable explosive yield of 0.01 kilotons (equivalent to 10 tons of TNT, or two to four times as powerful as the ammonium nitrate bomb which destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995)
The Davy Crockett was deployed with U.S. Army forces from 1961 to 1971. Between 1956 and 1963, 2,100 were produced at an estimated cost (excluding the warhead) of $540 million (in constant 1996 dollars).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...(nuclear_device)
http://www.brookings.edu/FP...
By netchicken:
posted on 12-10-2007
Fortunately it never was used as the range of the nuclear fallout included the soldiers who fired it.
We are lucky to have just missed an age of portable nuclear weaponry. Note in the video the soldiers being brushed down with brooms to presumably remove nuclear fallout!
One of the smallest nuclear weapons ever built, the Davy Crockett was developed in the late 1950s for use against Soviet troops in West Germany.
Small teams of the Atomic Battle Group (charged with operating the device) would be stationed every few kilometers to guard against Soviet attack, using the power of their nuclear artillery shells to kill or incapacitate advancing troop formations and irradiate the area so that it was uninhabitable for up to 48 hours, long enough to mobilize NATO forces.
The W54 warhead used on the Davy Crockett weighed just 51 pounds and was the smallest and lightest fission bomb (implosion type) ever deployed by the United States, with a variable explosive yield of 0.01 kilotons (equivalent to 10 tons of TNT, or two to four times as powerful as the ammonium nitrate bomb which destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995)
The Davy Crockett was deployed with U.S. Army forces from 1961 to 1971. Between 1956 and 1963, 2,100 were produced at an estimated cost (excluding the warhead) of $540 million (in constant 1996 dollars).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...(nuclear_device)
http://www.brookings.edu/FP...