Nukes
I am not quite of the age that grew up in fear that the Soviet Union (always the aggressor, of course) would one day get pissed off and nuke the living hell out of us. Backyard bomb shelters and nuclear air raid drills were a bit before my time. I remember discussion of proposed shell-game MX missile system, and the broadcast of the TV movie, The Day After, which was supposed to scare us into not blowing ourselves up.
Maybe I was blissfully ignorant, but it seemed that the Cold War doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction–the idea that no matter which side started a nuclear war, no one was going to be around to enjoy the spoils of victory–was working pretty darn well by the time I came along. Since the Cold War ended, though, the long shadow of the mushroom cloud seems to have diminished as a real threat in the public mind. My cultural reference is that as public fear of nuclear war faded, the more likely it has been for Hollywood nukes to actually go off–Cold War, James Bond movies–Goldfinger, Thunderball, for example–the nukes are disarmed at the last minute. Post-Soviet Union era–True Lies, for example–not only did a loose terrorist nuke go off, but the flash of the explosion served as the backdrop for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis to have a Hollywood kiss.
But it’s important to remember that the age of “Nuclear combat, toe-to-toe with the Rooskies,” as Major Kong (played by Slim Pickens) so eloquently put it in Dr. Strangelove, was not just a matter of loading a nuclear winter’s worth of MIRVs in a ballistic submarine and waiting for the other guy to blink. Military planners, US and Soviet, contemplated many scenarios in which nukes might be used in more tactical scenarios.
For example, consider what the Army called the “Davy Crockett,” or the M65 Recoilless Nuclear Rifle. This mini-nuke could carried or mounted on a jeep, and to be honest, it looks like a nuclear weapon that Wile E. Coyote might pull out and fire on the Road Runner, with the inevitable backfire leaving the Coyote singed black, possibly collapsing into a pile of irradiated ash. The truth of the matter is that the actual function of this bomb was not far off the cartoon scenario–the sub-kiloton weapon could only be fired about two and half miles, meaning that the crew that fired the weapon would be within the blast range. It will be comforting to know that we made 2100 of these toys and deployed them in the field for ten years, until 1971.
The W-54 warhead that made the Davy Crockett possible seemed like such a good idea, the Pentagon used it at least in two other weapons–an air-to-air missile, presumably used for making DAMN sure you shot down that plane, and as what for lack of a better term might be called a “backpack bomb,” intended to be used by special forces to blow up dams or bad guys or something.
The Russians, meanwhile, were never ones for quiet understatement. In part because whatever we did, the Russians had to do it bigger, but mostly because they couldn’t make their missiles as accurate as ours, so they needed to make bigger and bigger bombs, in 1961, the Soviets conducted a test of the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. Called the Tsar Bomb, the device itself weighed 27 tons, and had an explosive yield of 50 megatons, or 50 million tons of TNT, if you’ve forgotten your cold war jargon. The bomb had to have a parachute to slow its descent to detonation altitude or the pilots would not have survived the test.
We’re less concerned about Soviet nukes these days, except to the point of hoping that bad guys don’t get a hold of a stray one. North Korea and Pakistan have them, though it seems that leaders in both of those countries should realize with even a passing read of 20th century history that just having a nuke is a far more potent tool of foreign policy than using one.
As I noted above, I kind of miss the simplicity of the Cold War Mutual Assured Destruction, Nuclear-Triad years. The world is more complicated now and the odds that one of these damn things might go off someplace that will actually do some damage seems a lot higher than it used to be. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen… because there are still people around who remember what it was like the last time one these was used, not just tested.
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