19. A Corporal With a Nuke?
The Davy Crockett’s greatest danger however was the fact that it was deployed at all, and deployed very low down the chain of command at that. The weapons system was under the physical control of three soldiers roaming the battlefield in a Jeep, who, in practice, would have been able to fire a nuclear weapon at their de facto discretion, whether authorized or not. Shockingly, it took ten years before the Pentagon decided that it might be unwise to give a lieutenant, a sergeant, and a corporal, the discretion to fire the opening shot in what might quickly escalate into a global nuclear holocaust.
The West Germans in particular were enthusiastic about deploying the Davy Crockett with their ground forces. However, they were turned down by the US because the manner in which they proposed to incorporate the weapon into their defensive strategy would have made its use nearly automatic as soon as war began. That was undesirable, because it would have eliminated NATO’s option to fight without using nuclear weapons and risking an escalation from tactical nukes in the battlefield to a nuclear Armageddon.
