Matt Wants Big Boom

One of the things I've always had a kind of morbid fascination with is the concept of nuclear warfare, and more specifically, the delivery systems, weapons, and effects of said weapons. It is the most horrible thing that man can inflict on his fellow beings, along with chemical and biological warfare. However, I find the purely technical aspects of it fascinating. I don't really know why, but I suppose it goes in line with my fascination with all manner of extremes.

I like giant, unstable Wolf-Rayett stars - some 150 times more massive than our own sun - that burn for only a few million years and then explode with such titanic, incomprehensible force that they annihilate all around them for billions of miles. I like the world's hottest pepper, the Naga Viper, because it can reduce even a strapping specemin of masculinity such as myself to a quivering pile of blubbering, weepy pain. I like giant animals because they have evolved to make good use of proportions that dwarf people several times over. I like subatomic particles because they're so damn small and hard to understand, and yet we're made of them - everything is. From very big to very small, very fast to very slow, I like all manner of extremes. And going off on tangents. Ahem.

One of the more interesting nuclear weapons ever developed was made by the US in the late 1950s: the Davy Crockett weapons system. It got its name after one of the great folk heroes of American history. It consisted of a big, but still man-portable bazooka tube, a stabilizing tripod, and a single, large self-propelled round. The main thing setting this device apart from other bazookas was the nuclear warhead it packed in its bulbous frame. 

"Vaporizer of the wild frontier!"

The bomb itself was extremely low-yield for a nuke. No city would be completely annihilated if it was used. It was, however still a nuke, and thus extremely powerful by conventional standards. It could level 2 city blocks easily with one shot. The total yield was selectable from the equivalent of 10 to 20 tons of TNT. That's like taking an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer, stuffing the whole damn trailer completely full of TNT, and setting it off. For comparison, the recent suicide bombing at the Moscow Domodedovo airport a few days ago killed 35 people, and the device the bomber employed used the equivalent of only 15 pounds of TNT.

The Davy Crockett was a pretty damn powerful device for something that didn't need to be schlepped around via a bomber or carrier or ballistic missile. It could be packed in the back of a truck with little trouble, and set up by just a few people. However, the device had poor accuracy, which was probably one of the reasons it was eventually scrapped. But unlike a traditional bomb, the fact that this device was nuclear meant it had an unseen advantage: massive irradiation of whatever it hit. The idea was to have soldiers stationed with a bunch of these in western Europe, and if the Soviets ever invaded, these devices could be used to kill advancing troops and render certain strategic choke-points uninhabitable for up to 48 hours via radiation. This would allow enough time to mobilize NATO forces and mount a counterattack.

The device was only tested once, in 1962, at the Nevada Proving Grounds.
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So, not an Earth-shattering kaboom, but if you were part of an advancing troop formation you would be pretty much fucked, even if you were inside a tank. If the heat and blast didn't kill or cripple you outright, the radiation would take care of the job in short order. The device was obviously never used in actual combat, thank goodness. Things probably would have escalated quickly into full-blown nuclear war if they were used en masse. Then again, it was only designed to be used tactically, so a war bad enough to warrant its deployment would probably already be well on the way to WWIII by that time.

I am fascinated with this weapon because it represents a unique duality of extremes. On the one hand, it is close to the lower limit in terms of the size at which a functioning nuclear weapon can exist. On the other hand, despite its small size it was capable of massive devastation, eclipsed only in recent years by non-nuclear ordinance in the form of huge thermobaric gravity-propelled bombs such as the MOAB and its Russian equivalent. Despite this morbid fascination, I am very glad this device was never used in actual combat.

Matt wants big boom. But not that badly.