Cold war bomb warmed by chickens | Hacker News Reader

Cold war bomb warmed by chickens

news.bbc.co.uk

Reminds me of this other cold war project, the pidgeon-guided missile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

The fact that there's such a thing as a nuclear landmine is more surprising to me than anything else in the story.

Edit: Article says it would have been manually, remotely detonated, so that's at least a little less crazy.

Israel is believed to have nuclear land mines placed in the Golan Heights, due to the strategic importance of that area. If Israel ever attacked and militarily forced to withdraw from that area, it's likely to become a radioactive exclusion zone.

Give how small that whole area is, it sounds cracy to consider it an option as this would likely radiate much more than just the heights ... with wind it would nicely spread out to the whole area. :(

When they believe that they face an existential threat, military planners often consider options which would otherwise be considered crazy. Look at mutually assured destruction, for example...

(Whether Israel actually does face an existential threat is irrelevant here; the fact that they believed they faced such a threat from their Arab neighbours explains their actions, regardless of whether that belief was correct.)

There's a great book all about the old decisions on these topics by Eric Schlosser called Command and Control (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C5R7F8G/) which is also available as a PBS documentary http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/command-and...

There's some pretty interesting rational behind the creation of those kinds of munition (including the "nuclear rifle") but their argument seems to boil down to 2 things: 1, at the time where the USSR and the Western European states were still living with a divided germany US assessments found that the number of troops we could collectively muster were vastly less than the current standing european force of the USSR. People were very worried there wouldn't be much we could do if a land invasion overran the troops other than immediately retaliate with a full nuclear strike against soviet cities. These were though of as a weird middle ground

2. The Army was getting worried it would be cut out of money and relevance as more and more focus was moved to the Air Force because most weapons at the time were delivered by planes under the control of the strategic air command. They became ever more worried later as submarine launched missiles gave more nuclear firepower to the navy. Afraid they'd be totally left out the Army started requesting hundreds of thousands of "tactical" weapons like nuclear landmines, nuclear man launched missiles, nuclear artillery shells etc.

Is it significant that the publish date is April Fool's Day, 2004?

> Tom O'Leary, head of education and interpretation at the National Archives, told the paper: "It does seem like an April Fool but it most certainly is not. The Civil Service does not do jokes."

In my sleep deprived stupor, I read that title as "Cold War, Bombed by Chickens" and got very very interested.

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