“When a problem comes along, you must nuke it. Before the cream sets out too long, you must nuke it.”
~Devo
In 1945, America dropped Little Boy and Fat Man, two uranium fission bombs, over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the first and only time that a nuclear (pronounced “new-klee-er”) weapon has been used in warfare. While scientists have spent decades since making the bombs more powerful and advanced, thousands of nuclear bombs have been set off at various test sites and in Valencia, California during mediocre seasons of 24.
While we don’t talk much about nuclear weapons and deterrents anymore, during the Cold War, the nuclear threat was everywhere, which is what happens when you find yourself mired in a 45 year superpower dick measuring contest where the two participants have the capability to extinguish all life on the planet. Thankfully, we don’t have to grow up watching “duck and cover” film reels at school anymore. But that doesn’t mean that in the 70 years that the technology for nuclear weapons has existed that we’ve not gotten a little carried away with our favorite radioactive toy.
Let’s blow things up in the weirdest way possible.
The Craziest Nuclear Weapon Plans In American History
Listen, nuclear bombs are bad and scary and kill people and are pretty much responsible for the closest thing to a worldwide game of Russian Roulette we’ve ever encountered. We get that. At the same time, we’re also long past the days where we’d have shit like “Miss Atomic Bomb” as a pin-up girl and, honestly, removed from the situation, it’s kind of bemusing to us that during that time we had a whole slew of ideas around nuclear bombs that ranged from “bad” to “okay, did you even think this shit through?” Sure, some are terrifying. But a lot of them are funny, because we’ve stopped nuking space and, hey, we’re still here, man.
We spent a lot of time playing with matches, and we’ve not been burned yet. We’d say that’s pretty damn impressive.
Honorable Mention: Killer Nuclear Launch Codes
This first entry doesn’t technically count, because it was never an actual plan that America tried to implement. Rather, it was an idea suggested by Roger Fisher in the March 1981 issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that doubled as a way to deter the use of nuclear force through sheer humanity, while also being the most metal fucking thing ever. Essentially, Fisher’s proposal focused on how we handle the nuclear launch codes that typically are placed in the “atomic football” suitcase that’s carried around by whatever lucky Naval officer wants to spend his whole day thinking, “Holy shit, I am the gatekeeper of nuclear war.” Instead of putting it in a suitcase, Fisher suggested that we place the launch codes in a capsule that we then surgically implant next to the heart of a volunteer.
Some of you know where we’re going with this, but those of you who have soft, gentle, unblemished souls might be wondering, “Wait, why would you implant it in someone’s body? How would they get it out if they really needed th…oh God.” Yes, that’s right, his duty would be to follow the President while carrying on his persons a heavy, sheathed Bowie knife. Which, in the case of a nuclear war, he would hand to the President, who would have to kill the man as he lies and dig into his corpse to retrieve the codes like a deleted scene from a fucking Saw movie.
Again, this is the most metal thing imaginable. This is the nuclear deterrent equivalent of a scorpion playing a double-necked guitar while wearing a demon mask. The thought process here was that, since in order to use nukes, where you would likely be killing millions, if not billions, of people, that the President would first have to face death before issuing death. It’d be like making someone snap a puppies neck in order to earn the right to eat a steak—most of us would see that option and think, “Well I’m a vegetarian now.” By most of us, we mean you. Our writers would still do it. Oh, we’d cry, and it would haunt us forever, but we just like steak too damn much. Sorry, Fido.
Anyway, this was never an official plan, though one Pentagon official did say that he could not imagine a President issuing a nuclear strike if that is what it entailed. To which we’d say, eh, depends on the President, we could see LBJ not only doing it without hesitation, but also kind of having fun while doing it.
But now, on to the real honest to God nuclear plans of America.
Davy Crockett (“Oh This Should End Well”)
That up there is the Davy Crockett, an actual nuclear device that we not only proposed, but fucking made. We would not fault you if you decided to call it “a nuclear bazooka” or maybe “Pull the trigger and whelp you’re dead now.” It technically was a “tactical nuclear recoilless rifle” or a smoothbore gun, but we like to call it “a really short-sided and bad fucking idea.” The whole contraption weighs about 76 pounds, which means that you can carry around a nuclear device that can destroy a city with about the same amount of exertion as, say, giving your 10 year old child a piggy back ride. Full disclosure, we’re not good at guessing the weight of children.
The Davy Crockett was developed in the 1950s, when our fervent blind fear of Russia was still fresh enough for logic to not yet kick in, so we had scientists saying, “Well, if we’re having troops in the field, how can we get THEM to nuke the bad guys?” and someone said, “kamikazeeeee” like, as a pretty insensitive joke, but everyone just chuckled because the 1950s were terrible, and when the laughter subsided someone said, “no but yeah let’s totally have a soldier shoot it from a bazooka and almost assuredly die from it. This is a great idea.”
Technically, the warhead had a lethal range of about a quarter of a mile, and a firing range of around two miles, so it probably wasn’t going to kill the person firing it unless they aimed it really poorly. Oh, and did we mention that it “proved to have poor accuracy in testing” so the main purpose of the thing was to irradiate a random area somewhere *waves hands* over there enough to make it all dead. This was a thing we spent money making. Like, no, we made over 2,000 of these. We made over 2,000 of these, and spent money to make over 2,000 of these, and now we’re trillions of dollars in debt. Sometimes, we think there was very little difference between how we spent money on the military during the Cold War and how a 14 year old kid would spend ten million dollars if we gave him a sack of cash and told him to just, geek out.
Project Pluto (Nuclear Powered Cruise Missile Engines)
Oh man. So, we as a nation had a period where we thought radiation was “pretty cool” and not “don’t you recognize me Susan? It’s me, Stan? I’ve…I’ve been changed, that’s all, but I’m still the same on the inside! It was the accident! The accident, Susan, don’t you see?” Which is why we thought it would be a good idea to make an engine for cruise missiles out of a nuclear reactor, which we dubbed Project Pluto because Project Shit Is That A Third Ear Growing On My Neck was a bit too cumbersome.
The design was for a ramjet engine, which basically means that it would be launched by a series of rockets until it could get air to flow through the front. This flowing air would then be superheated by the internal nuclear reactor, which would create thrust. There was actually a terrifying logic behind this—essentially, since nuclear reactors can run indefinitely, once you launch the missile, instead of trying to get enough thrust for the missile to travel from, say, America to Russia, it could fly around the world for fucking ever until we decided to send it down on it’s (multiple) targets, dropping nuclear bombs like Santa Claus before itself going critical and exploding.
We managed to make two experimental engines in the program, in 1961 and 1964—one engine, the Tory-IIA, worked for a few seconds, while the Tory-IIC ran for five minutes at full power. Presumably, Tory-IIB decided that you weren’t the boss of him, dad, and he’s going to go into the family business, he got accepted into art school. We abandoned the project shortly thereafter, since we were able to make Intercontinental ballistic missiles by that point, and the fact that “having a forever flying nuclear-powered missile flying around the world always” was, and we’re quoting them here, “too provocative” which is like saying getting stabbed 83 times “hurts a little bit.” So we abandoned the project in 1964, presumably after memory wiping everyone who worked on it.
Operation Argus (Nuke Outer space)
Let’s just say it straight out—America has nuked outer space for reasons that basically amounted to scientists saying, “We were just curious what would happen” with an aw shucks shrug. In fact, we’ve done it five times. The first instance was Argus, which is why it gets mentioned here, while Starfish Prime was arguably the most notable instance of our space nuking ways, because it really hit home how bad of an idea nuking space is and led to everyone agreeing “Okay, no nukes in space allowed, got it.”
Why did we want to nuke outer space? Because it was the 1950s, and we figured, hey, there’s a whole outer space thing up there, what would happen if we shot the most powerful and destructive weapon crafted by man into it and blew it to hell. Project Argus shot three different 1.5 kiloton nukes into space within a few weeks in 1958. These were detonated at altitudes of 110 miles (keep in mind what we call “space” begins at 62), 190 miles, and, Jesus, 493 miles.
Because we managed to nuke heaven without God smushing us, we decided to try it again in 1962. Enter, Starfish Prime, which detonated at “only” 240 miles up with a 1.4 megaton blast, because fuck it, go big or go home. It was done about 900 miles from Hawaii, which is just about 900 miles too close to watch a highly radioactive display of hubris. Here’s what the explosion looked like. It destroyed one-third of all the satellites in lower Earth orbit. Like, one third of all the ones in existence. So, you know, it was a success? Go us?
Project Orion (Nukes to Mars)
We’re not entirely sure what space did to piss us off, but we sure did spend a fuckload of time trying to nuke it to get back at it for something. We’ve already talked about nuking space a handful of times, but Project Orion really manages to serve as another example of how we shouldn’t have been trusted to have responsibility as a nation in the 1950s.
Essentially, we wanted to use nukes to travel through space. Nukes, plural. As in, imagine a space ship that poops nukes to move. Just, drop a nuke behind you, and use the blast to lift you up. It was estimated that you could get up to about 10% of the speed of light with this method, which would have made it ideal for interplanetary travel, as in, say, going to Mars and, oh yeah, we’ll back up a bit, you probably are still trying to wrap your head around the whole “pooping nukes” thing.
Yeah. Basically, we’d load it up with nuclear bombs, and to gain thrust, would drop one behind it, and ride the explosion to spaceville. So this was not only us nuking space, it was nuking space, and our asses, dozens of times at least. Like whipping a horse to make it go faster, only the whip is nukes, and the horse is a ship, filled with nukes, and the jockey is dead because, lol, sorry for all that radiation feller, boldly go where no corpse has gone before.
The worst part is, the idea was initially even dumber, because the first versions of the ship were supposed to be launched with nukes to, which of course would lead to, you know, all the nuclear fallout ever. Just, all of it. Goddamn, we were pretty much just toddlers sticking random pointy shit in various orifices and hoping we didn’t get injured back then, weren’t we?
Project A119 (Nuke the Moon)
Leave space alone, dammit! What did space ever do to us!?
Anyway, our final entry into this strange world of “America getting too happy with their shiny nukes” is Project A119, a top secret 1958 plan that included a young Carl Sagan. We basically saw ourselves lagging in the space race, and before deciding to go full throttle into a moon mission, we took the spoiled child having a tantrum approach—if Russia was going to get to the moon before us, we were going to have to break the moon before they got there. Or at least nuke the moon to leave a giant crater that would be visible from the surface of Earth as a massive “Fuck you, we’re America, we’ll do what we want” to the rest of the world.
It’s basically the “nuking the moon” equivalent of licking the last slice of pizza in the box to stop anyone from trying to eat it.
We thankfully didn’t go through with the plan, “out of fear of a negative public reaction” because apparently, after setting up the entire project, someone decided to sit down and think, “Hmm…to be fair, shooting a nuke at the moon sounds less like something the good guys would do and more like the opening scene of a James Bond film” before pulling the plug.
Which, goddamn, it took you long enough. Don’t nuke the moon, America. We can’t believe we actually have to say that out loud. Chill out.
Yeesh.
