21. That Time We Passed Tactical Nukes Around Like Skittles
During the Cold War, the US military deployed tactical nuclear warheads by the thousands. Alarmingly, those weapons, whose battlefield use during a conventional war could easily have escalated things into a nuclear Armageddon, were entrusted to personnel way down the chain of command. Basically, it was a situation where a jittery lieutenant, or even a corporal, could have kicked off a chain of events that concluded with the extinction of humanity.
The Davy Crockett Weapon System was a smoothbore recoilless rifle that fired a W54 warhead – a tactical nuclear explosive with a yield of up to 1 kiloton. To put that in perspective, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had yields of 15 and 21 kilotons, respectively. The M-28 version of the Davy Crockett could fire its warhead up to a distance of 1.25 miles, while the later M-29 version had a range of 2.5 miles. Developed in the 1950s, over 2000 Davy Crocketts and their launch systems were deployed with US ground forces in West Germany and Korea from 1961 to 1971.
