For 25 Years, U.S. Forces Carried Miniature Nukes on Their Backs
The B-54 Special Atomic Demolition Munition was a nuclear bomb the size of a backpack

In the wake of World War II, and throughout the Cold War, the United States and its NATO allies were severely out manned and outgunned compared to the Soviets and their allies. To balance the scales, the United States wielded the will, or at least the bluster, to threaten mass nuclear retribution for any militaristic slight, says Foreign Policy:

The strategy had a major flaw, however. Though massive retaliation was economical, it allowed the United States almost no flexibility in how it responded to enemy aggression. In the event that communist forces launched a limited, non-nuclear attack, the president would have to choose between defeat at the hands of a superior conventional force or a staggeringly disproportionate (and potentially suicidal) strategic nuclear exchange that would kill hundreds of millions of people.
To fill in the gap in military options between a full nuclear assault and engaging in a lopsided war, says Foreign Policy, U.S. special forces started packing miniature nuclear bombs, devices known as the B-54 Special Atomic Demoliniton Munition (SADM), which they could carry in a backpack. The plan was to build something a little smaller than the devastating bombs that had been designed after the end of the Second World War.
Adam Rawnsley and David Brown chronicle in a sprawling feature the stories of the special forces troops. “Soldiers from elite Army engineer and Special Forces units, as well as Navy SEALs and select Marines, trained to use the bombs, known as "backpack nukes," on battlefronts from Eastern Europe to Korea to Iran," they write.

The troops were trained to parachute or SCUBA dive behind enemy lines with their little nukes, to using them to take out strategic installations or render vast tracts of land uninhabitable. According to Rawnsley and Brown, "These "small" weapons, many of them more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, would have obliterated any battlefield and irradiated much of the surrounding area.”
These little nukes were, fortunately, never used.

My recruiter back in the day said that his mos was atomic demolitions munitions specialist

For a while there people went crazy and made all kinds of shit they shouldn't have.

Yes they did.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_

This is what my Dad did in the late 60s

The idea being that they could be deployed on a "maybe" basis and make a judgement call. They were also more precise than any other delivery system during that time.

It was basically a suicide mission. I can't imagine toting those fuckers around was high on anyone's list of to-dos.

Legend has it that there were M30s all over west germany at one point. Just parked in little out of the way spots. Waiting for some cat to come along to set them and GTFO.

Did they make one with a yield above 1kton?   Wiki says that was the max.

The Green Light teams. Generally considered to be one way missions by the team members due to the fusing limitation.
Man, the middle Cold War was really dire. Senior military and even a lot of politicians had the direct memory of WW2 and Korea. The USSR rolled up eastern Europe and brutally suppressed political movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia by outright mass murder, and Comintern was running wild globally. Communist revolutions across Africa, Asia and the Americas. Europeans trying their damnedest to appease the USSR and play the US to pay for Socialism at the same time.
Everyone watched the Soviets machine gun men, women and children trying to cross the wall to the West...no one had ever heard of trying to keep people in a political system from simply leaving before. They turned eastern Europe into a prison for a half century.
Under the pressure, technology advanced so fast some people believed it had to be aliens.
What a time.

12E MOS. Knew one odd little dude who enlisted as as 12E. He barely made it out of the reception station.

Spot on. My old Team SGT told me about the Green Light teams and the reality was you basically graded the munition until it went off

Gotta be something else to willingly strap a nuke to your back.
Now its got me wondering is there any sort of residual gamma coming off it or idle nukes in general or is that not really a thing?

Always been fascinated by those.   They have the whole setup displayed at the Nuke museum in LAS.    It was just a way to take out point targets, in the days before gps/Ins/laser guided munitions.  

Future nukes will be even smaller.

Nukes are not black magic.   All the radiation is measurable.

Yeah, i meant is there anything measurable above background like a smoke detector or fresh 238, only wondering cuz it's strapped to your back.

My battalions German Defensive Plan included an ADM prechamber in the Fulda Gap, that we were to defend at all cost.  We could not pull back until released by a COE officer.  It was one of the strange cases where a 2LT could give a LTC orders "at the direction of the POTUS."

I want the backpack.....

I thought I had read something about them having a larger yield, like in the 5-10kt range, but I would trust wiki over my memory.
There was also rumors about how we lost a number of them, some said it was half a dozen and others said it was closer to 20.

One of the fictional what-if Cold War books I read discussed using W33 based nukes that were loaded in vehicles.

Would really depend on pit design and shielding, most warheads by that time were pretty low radiation in static storage.

I think there is/was a member here with firsthand knowledge of those things

Ok, figured it was insignificant enough just wasn't sure if it would make for a good pillow or not at the end of the day.

It is a thing. I have a friend who worked around nukes in the AF and has the same letter in his medical records about radiation exposure that the guys who were in the above ground nuke test got. It freaked out his VA examiner who could not believe it was real.

It's all fun and games until Mohamed walks up to the steps of the Capitol building with his backpack nuke and says "this one is for Allah".  Or until Won Hung Low does the same thing and says "Xi would be so proud of me".

kwg

Dang, do they wear any sort of dosimetry?

LOL, Two of my favorite "Duh Fuqh Were Dey Tinking" nukes. I get bombs just small enough to get in the bomber. I get bombs built to wipe out a city. I get "Mutually Assured Destruction". But Davy Crocketts and SADM's...still had soldiers assigned to USE them if ordered. Oughta tell ya something......

Which brings the question....what did they DO with all of those? Under the SALT treaty(s) they had to be decommissioned. Removing the physics packages from the rest of the device probably wasn't enough. So the radioactive cores were stored, the tritium, explosives, electronics were removed and recycled and the actual bomb casings probably got shredded too. Or, they kept some complete or mostly complete for, you know, a rainy day LOL. I doubt even supply knows where all their shit is. I'm pretty sure there was at least one Air Force General that wasn't about to let anybody destroy all those W53 9 megatonners off the Titan missiles, LOL. Nopt to mention some other stuff that "might come in handy someday".

There was a trainer ruck system on Gunbroker 2 years ago for $6000 I think. Attached File


I did 2 tours in the Berlin Brigade Feb 89-Dec 90, Oct 92-94, was there when The Wall was opened.  During CQ Duty, you were only allowed to read military manuals or other "educational" BS.   I remember leafing through the Berlin Brigade Phonebook, it would list every phone number and fax for every unit down to Rifle Company, Supply, NBC Room, Arms Room, etc     All except one page, "Special Security Detachment-Berlin", which had its own page but only one phone number was listed, there were rumors about high speed types in The City, gossip, latrine bullshit, etc.

Little known fact, there was a "secret" Special Forces Detachment "A" of the 10SFG out of Bad Tolz (then), that specialized in counter-terrorism and irregular warfare.  Their main mission was ODAs trained and equiped to be 'stay behind" Teams that would build resistance networks and hit targets of opportunity to help tie down as many Warsaw Pact forces around Berlin as possible.  They had pre-established weapons and explosives caches around the city.  

Another little known fact, Berlin has more miles of canals than Venice, Italy.   There are still tunnels and drainage culverts that go under the Berlin Wall.    There were more Combat Diver certified SF guys per capita in Berlin than most any other ODA in the Regiment.    The ODAs were trained to use scuba as well as closed circuit rebreather systems to infiltrate into East Berlin/East Germany through the Spree Canal and other waterways.   One of the tasks included the deployment of Mk54 SADMs in rear areas of East Germany/East Berlin like troop marshalling areas, rail yards, highway and rail bridges, etc.    Rumors were there were several Mk54 SADM pre-positioned in West Berlin until the Wall was opened in November 1989.   They also trained to parachute into East Germany with the Mk54 from the USAF Tempelhof Air Field in the American Sector.

463 MOS I believe that number is correct.

That's a lot of backpack whoop-ass.

Any PSA daily deals on these things?

Forgive me as I can’t remember the screen name.
There is a member here who trained for the SADM mission (ODA???) and has awesome stories.
Hopefully he will chime in.

Somebody's reading/listening to Jack Carr's 'Only the Dead'.

What did he do?

PS - The item in your second picture is a 70-1 warhead, not a 54

PANTEX plant outside of Lubbock Amarillo Amarillo Amarillo Texas in Borger.  

Decommissioned various nuclear weapons to Recycle "Critical National Security Strategic Materials".

@Kobolowsky_Tires

Bigger_Hammer

Will these show up on sportsman guide?

Pantex is northeast of Amarillo IIRC.  Lubbock is roughly two hours south of Amarillo.

ETA:  corrected

I don't know but will ask him the next time we talk.

Is Pantex nearer Lubbock or Amarillo?  If closer to Lubbock I sure blew my chance for a tour when I was at Texas Tech.

I visited the Atomic Museum in Las Vegas and one of the displays they had was of this backpack nuclear munition prop on display.   They didn't have name or display card to it but it looks just like the ones in this thread.

Wasn’t the SNUKE smaller than the SADM ?

If you were attending Texas Tech, you were too busy downing cold beers, eating Stubbs BBQ, and partying with the beautiful Texas Tech wimminz to bother with a Pantex tour.

It's less than 20 miles outside of Amarillo.

Sorry - my panhandle geography went a bit "dyslexic" I couldn't see the forest because of all those trees!   ...

Bigger_Hammer

Amarillo. Texas Tech does own some of the land surrounding the plant and has research facilities there.

I wouldn't mind having one. It would be an interesting conversation piece.

Thanks.

No matter what the percentage is from the mineshaft gap our mineshafts have been engineered to be free of the middle class population. The shaft space was to be allocated to the protected classes.

However since the protected classes cannot understand normal thinking (c.u.n.t.) the middle class is responsible to continue digging mineshafts so that the protested classes can spend their reparations.

If you want to read about it, this book is available:

Attached File

I am looking at that back pack and wondering how much room there was for candy. It doesn’t seem like a lot. They should rethink their approach.

Research and engineering was the Wild West back in the old days.  Many projects pursued with (what we would now consider) a complete disregard for safety or ethics.

I mean, the Demon Core alone claimed two lives simply because the researchers messing with it were careless.

They also weren't in close contact with a person nearly 24/7 either...

My I suggest?

I was involved with the logistical support of a green light mission while station while at Ft. Devens.  It was eye opening to say the least.  I do not believe they would have been coming home.  

I'll defer to our Green Light Team member on the forums if he chooses to jump into this thread.

18Z50