The US Army Once Deployed Thousands of Big Bazookas With a Nuclear Warhead
In the early days of the Cold War, atomic weapons were all the rage, and people had not yet thought through the implications of their use. In that atmosphere, the powers that be in the Pentagon decided to make nukes readily accessible to lower levels of command. The result was the Davy Crockett Weapon System, a smoothbore recoilless rifle developed in the 1950s, that looked like a Bazooka on a tripod, or a big Russian RPG with a fat rocket on its nose. The M-28 version could propel a tactical nuke to a distance of a mile and a quarter, while a later M-29 version doubled that to two and a half miles. Over 2000 Davy Crockett systems were deployed with US ground forces in West Germany and Korea from 1961 to 1971.
Setting aside the recklessness inherent in deploying such weapons at lower levels of the chain of command, the Crocketts had some serious defects. They were quite inaccurate – although pinpoint accuracy was not that important, considering the warhead. The Davy Crockett’s deadliness stemmed more from its radioactivity than its explosive yield, which was pretty small by atomic standards, equivalent to about 20 tons of TNT. However, that small atomic explosion was enough to produce an instantly lethal dose of radiation within a 500 foot radius, and an incapacitating and likely fatal dose up to a quarter mile away. That made the Davy Crockett more of a radiation dispenser than a smart bomb.
On top of the hazards of long term contamination, the weapon was dangerous to its own users. The M-28 version of the weapon had a maximum range of a mile and a quarter, while the M-29 version topped out at two and a half miles. As a result, the firing team, and other NATO personnel in the vicinity, could easily fall victim to radiation from their own side’s tactical nuclear warhead.
However, the greatest risk of the Davy Crockett was the fact that it was deployed at all. And deployed at very low levels of chain of command. In practice, the Davy Crocketts were under the physical control of three soldiers roaming the battlefield in a Jeep. In theory, the Crockett team needed authority from higher command to fire the weapon. In practice, given the chaos and fog of war, it is not difficult to imagine a variety of scenarios in which some lowly lieutenant, cut off from contact with higher HQ, fires off one or more nukes to save himself and his comrades from annihilation. Shockingly, it took a decade before somebody figured out that that it might be unwise to give a lieutenant, a sergeant, and a corporal, the means to unilaterally fire the opening shot in what might quickly escalate into a global nuclear holocaust.
At least the Pentagon had been wise enough not to hand out Davy Crocketts to the West Germans, who were quite eager to deploy them with their ground forces. They were turned down because the way they proposed to incorporate the weapon into their defensive strategy would have made its use nearly automatic as soon as war began.
