It’s the Cold War. You’re a US Special Forces operative, parachuting into enemy territory (could be Eastern Europe, could be North Korea). Besides your kit, you’ve got a 90 pound, half-kiloton nuke attached to your harness. Your job is to backpack it to your assigned target, evade patrols and guards, and set it off. And, since the timing mechanism is imprecise, you’re supposed to hang around nearby until if goes off.
Sound like fun?
This story from Foreign Policy on the history of the SADM (Special Atomic Demolitions Munition) is a reminder of how weird the Cold War got. The US Army felt that to keep pace with the other Services, it too needed a nuclear capability. The backpack demolition nuke grew out of ideas for “nuclear landscaping”, using nukes to create obstacles against advancing enemy forces. From there the SADM idea was claimed by the Special Forces types for offensive use. Tom Clancy would have been hard-pressed to think this stuff up.The article is quite fascinating, in a rather horrific way, and would make an excellent scenario for those of you that do Cold War goes hot gaming.
Cheers, MP+
Oy! That Field Manual looks familiar. My Dad had plenty of them. (I kept the one on map symbols which looks like an Avalon Hill handbook of symbols.)
ReplyDeleteNuclear Landscaping eh? Even I could get to like gardening on those terms!
ReplyDeleteNuclear Landscaping sounds alright unless your piece of Western Europe is getting landscaped to make it harder for the Soviets to roll through. No wonder people went green and anti-nuke in the 80s, because it was all bollocks.
DeleteWatching it go off sounds like a once in a lifetime mission. Unless you were allowed to watch from a lonnnnnnng way off.
ReplyDeleteOnly got to see one nuke up close except officially I and my green uniform wasn't there with my fellow midshipmen in white because I was a foreign exchange officer and anyway they wouldn't answer the middie who asked why those missiles over there had a different coloured warhead.Oh.
But any time the alarm went off, esp in port, you cleared the passageways and froze because the guys running through the passageways to respond had cocked pistols and rifles with 1 in the spout.
Young sailors running up and down gangways with loaded and cocked weapons is almost as scary as a backpack nuke!
DeleteI am channelling Count Floyd here "Very scary"
ReplyDeleteCheers
PD
That was an interesting article. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteNuclear landscaping...
ReplyDeleteAn interesting concept. I suppose we were rescued from that by the 'one goes off, they all go off' doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. The more I read about the Cold War the more surprised I am that we're still here.
A couple of quotes...
ReplyDelete- Army field manuals warned that it was "not possible to state that [the timers] will fire at a specific time,"
- NATO allies, particularly West Germany, were understandably apprehensive about the idea of U.S. forces lighting off scores of small nuclear weapons on their territory.
Nevertheless, one of the scarier aspects was that the programme was born out of inter-service rivalry!
You can understand now why the West Europeans got so twitchy about nukes on their soil in the last decades of the Cold War. They could sense that the whole thing was bollocks. Come to think of it, me and my fellow undergrads in the early 1980s got pretty bolshie as well.
DeleteI had a buddy who was an armorer in the Army. One time while closing an old munitions Depot, he found a "Davy Crocket" Atomic munition. No one new it was there. So after a few days on lock down. They finally removed it.
ReplyDeleteThat's a terrific story. Imagine what the Soviets, whose log systems were especially chaotic as the Cold War ended, left lying around in their former bases.
DeleteThat is a freighting thought.
DeleteWhat a great plan! What could possibly go wrong? :-)
ReplyDeleteWhat indeed? Imagine getting captured with one of those things on your back.
DeleteThat sounds like a bit of a rotten mission for the poor sod having to lug the nuke about.
ReplyDeleteI suppose if you told yourself it was only a one way hike, it wouldn't be so bad ...
DeleteSounds like a completely dumbarse concept to me. Here's a thing: the timer is set to go after, let us say, half an hour. I mean, five minutes, and the PBS carrying out the mission is going to smell a rat, eh? Forty-five minutes go by: no bang. What is the PBS to do? Go back and reset the timer? Which might yet go off at any time?
ReplyDeleteWhy not simply tell the PBS that this is a suicide mission. But it is vital for the preservation of the Free World (said without a trace of irony: in the vibrant tones of a True believer). When you got to the objective, push this bright red button. You won't feel a thing...
I think the article suggests that a lot of GIs volunteered for the program in the 1960s because it was better than Vietnam, while others, like B-52 and missile crews, probably just compartmentalized the reality of what they were training for and refused to think about it.
DeleteGrim stuff though morbidly fascinating... thanks for sharing the article.
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Pete.
Very scary times when you think about it.
ReplyDeleteAnd here is a picture of said 'nuke in a knapsack'
ReplyDeletehttp://atomic-annhilation.blogspot.com/2015/01/1970-nuke-in-knapsack.html'
A good trashy WW3 novel to take out in the field while tending your flock idealing with these SADM's is WWIII: BEHIND THE LINES TARGET NUKE BY JAMES B. ADAIR AND GORDON ROTTMAN.
ReplyDeletehttps://mcsmith187.wordpress.com/2014/12/20/wwiii-behind-the-lines-target-nuke-by-james-b-adair-and-gordon-rottman/
The war is going badly for NATO and the decision to use nuclear attacks to stop the Soviets results in a devastating counterattack. The two sides agree to a nuclear moratorium. Nuclear Demolition Teams operating inside East Germany are recalled. All but one team 032A does not respond...Yipes!!
21 used from 1 cent on amazon.
Fascinating & crazy stuff! Reminds me of Project Plowshare, where they planned to use nukes for engineering purposes in peace time. Why not blow a nice harbor out of the coast of Alaska? Experts say that fallout is negligible…
ReplyDeleteWe really can be glad that the Cold War ended before all those crazy schemes could be put into reality.
Even better - what about 10kt nuclear land mines...protected by chickens!!!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.damninteresting.com/nuclear-landmines/