
M65 Atomic Cannon - devicetray0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M65_atomic_cannon
======
NateEag
I was personally more astounded when I first discovered the Davy Crockett
nuclear warhead recoilless rifle:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_devic...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_\(nuclear_device\))

When I told my dad (who grew up in the Cold War) about the weapon, he said "Oh
yeah, I had the toy model version."

I'm often astonished any civilizations survived the Cold War.

~~~
matheusmoreira
Yeah. No guidance, no nuclear codes for authorization, no way to abort the
launch, nothing but a "handle with care" message on the nuke itself. The only
reason humanity survived is nobody dared to actually use this stuff.

They also made backpack nukes:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitcase_nuclear_device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suitcase_nuclear_device)

The USA also has chemical weapons stockpiles that haven't been fully destroyed
to this day. The Honest John rocket could be fitted with sarin warheads:

[https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Demonstration_clus...](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Demonstration_cluster_bomb.jpg)

~~~
Animats
* No nuclear codes for authorization*

It had a 3-digit arming code, set by turning three rotary switches with a
screwdriver. "Code must be correct or weapon will dud", says the comic-book
training manual.

~~~
mysterydip
Is there a scan of this manual online somewhere? I'd love to read it but not
sure what to search.

~~~
Animats
I can't find it any more. It's probably lost in the Internet Archive
somewhere. It was done by Will Eisner, who also did many of the long-running
US Army series of preventive maintenance comic books.[1] Those are still being
published, 66 years on.[2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS,_The_Preventive_Maintenance...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS,_The_Preventive_Maintenance_Monthly)
[2] [https://www.logsa.army.mil/#/psmag](https://www.logsa.army.mil/#/psmag)

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jws
If you are driving across Kansas on I-70 you can take a stop in Junction City
at Freedom Park. It is right at the exit on the south side. A short climb up
the hill past some other artillery gets you to the M65. It’s more or less
targeting Salina which is a 20 minute drive down the interstate.

You can get right up to it. And it hurled nuclear warheads a 20 minute drive
down the interstate.

Now that I double check the satellite photos, it isn’t so much aimed at Salina
as Hope, which seems fitting.

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sb057
I found this footage of the first Chinese nuclear test astounding when it was
posted on YouTube 13 years ago:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xoHbBkUGSQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xoHbBkUGSQ)

~~~
NamTaf
For the record, that's a segment from the documentary movie _Trinity and
Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie_ [1]. It's an incredible documentary and I
thoroughly recommend anyone interested in the development of atomic weapons
finds a copy of it.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_and_Beyond](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_and_Beyond)

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Ididntdothis
Growing up in Germany it was weird to think if these weapons or similar ones
were ever used it would probably mean that Germany and probably parts of
Europe would be destroyed. Pretty scary.

~~~
perl4ever
The Wikipedia page has a picture of the cannon with a nuclear explosion seven
miles away. Isn't Germany larger than 7 miles wide, not to mention I thought
it was part of Europe?

~~~
smacktoward
If things had ever gotten to the point where atomic cannons were being fired
in anger, there would have been a _lot_ of nuclear weapons flying around.

~~~
dragontamer
There are different grades to nuclear weaponry. A lot of the weapons in
discussion here are tactical: something like the Davy Crockett can blow up
only a city block... but more realistically would be used to wipe out part of
a military base or maybe one or two ships. 100kT or less, Davy Crockett being
~10 Tons (or 0.01 kT)

The "strategic nukes" on the other hand, are city-destroyers. 10Megatons or
bigger, 100x or 10,000x larger than tactical nukes.

\-------

In effect: a tactical nuclear weapon is fired even if there are friendly
forces nearby. In contrast, strategic nukes are fired when you want to kill
everybody in an area.

Even if a serious war started, no sane person would ever dare to touch
strategic nukes. Once strategic nukes start flying, its pretty much the end of
the world as we know it. The only response to a strategic nuke is to follow
through with MAD.

Tactical nukes are small enough that MAD may not be triggered. It would be an
unprecedented escalation, but military generals around the world would quickly
try to draw the line at "tactical nukes only". The problem is that no one has
really drawn a hard line at what makes a nuke "strategic" or "tactical"...
there's a smooth curve from 10 Tons (Davy Crockett) all the way up to Tsar
Bomba (50,000,000 Tons). So there's a big fear that starting even with small
tactical weapons would lead to a path of escalation towards the biggest nukes.

~~~
roywiggins
The real problem is that if you hear a big boom and your communications fail,
_how do you know the Russians haven 't launched at the US mainland_?

You're a commander of a small airfield in the Pacific and the last you heard
from the US was that tactical nukes had been used in Europe. Now,
communications are down. You have a bunch of planes ready to go, and if
there's missiles or planes headed your way, you'll die pointlessly if you
don't put them in the air. You have a letter from the President authorizing
you to launch in this situation.

Now what?

~~~
dragontamer
> You're a commander of a small airfield in the Pacific and the last you heard
> from the US was that tactical nukes had been used in Europe

If you hear the boom and you're not dead... then it was probably tactical.

Strategic nukes aren't launched one-at-a-time. They'll be launched thousands-
at-a-time. You're simply dead, you'll be pulvarized by multiple ICBMs before
you even know what hit you.

The plan is to launch your strategic nukes in retaliation BEFORE they hit
their targets. Alternatively, you have enough secret nuclear submarines to
launch your strategic counter-attack after-the-fact (even if the mainland is
destroyed).

\-----------

The launching of any ICBM would probably trigger the end of the world as we
know it. ICBMs fly at such speeds that they cannot be reliably stopped:
they're basically spacecraft. Once launched, their target is effectively going
to be destroyed within 10-minutes or so.

The real risk of strategic weapons is misidentifying a flock of birds as an
ICBM (or other such technical glitch).

~~~
roywiggins
I was garbling a scenario from Ellsberg's book. I believe the time period in
question was the 50s-early 60s (the same period where these tactical nukes
were popular) when MAD was being enforced by bombers, not ICBMs.

According to Ellsberg, there was a period where there was no actual plan to
defend Europe by other means than massive nuclear retaliation.

[https://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Machine-Confessions-
Nuclear-...](https://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Machine-Confessions-Nuclear-
Planner/dp/1608196704)

------
h2odragon
As always, the problem with antiquated arms is: you can't afford the
ammunition.

What a cool machine, and a goofy concept by modern lights. I'd love to go look
at how that's actually built.

~~~
smacktoward
You think that's crazy, you should see some of the other things the Army was
working on at around the same time.

At least the M65 could lob its atomic payload a respectable distance away from
the people operating it. That wasn't as true of the "Davy Crockett" atomic
rifle
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_devic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_device%29)),
though, which could fire an extremely low-yield (equivalent to 10-20 tons of
TNT) atomic warhead a distance of 1-2 miles, tops. That would probably have
been far enough to avoid killing the operators of the weapon when it went off,
though if the wind was blowing the wrong way they would have had some nasty
exposure to radiation.

And beyond even that was the so-called "Special Atomic Demolition Munition"
(SADM:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Muni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Munition)),
which used the same warhead as used on the Davy Crockett, only this time
packed into a backpack (!). The idea was that a soldier would either hump the
backpack to the target on foot or be air-dropped in with it, plant the
backpack near a strategic target, set a detonation timer on it, and then run
like hell. _Foreign Policy_ magazine ran a good article about what it was like
to be one of the guys tasked with this mission a few years back
([https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/30/the-littlest-
boy/](https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/30/the-littlest-boy/)). Spoiler alert,
it was kind of a stressful job.

------
daveslash
Heh, I was just reading up on this yesterday while doing some recreational
research into atomic weapons testing in Nevada. Look on Google Maps here to
see a thousand craters [0]. Turns out, they even give tours once a month [1].

[0]
[https://www.google.com/maps/@37.1496894,-116.0575635,3767m/d...](https://www.google.com/maps/@37.1496894,-116.0575635,3767m/data=!3m1!1e3)

[1]
[https://www.nnss.gov/pages/PublicAffairsOutreach/NNSStours.h...](https://www.nnss.gov/pages/PublicAffairsOutreach/NNSStours.html)

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miohtama
Here is some good info about minimum payload (16kg) needed for fission

[http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-2.html](http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-2.html)

