For seven years, the U.S. government pursued a top secret project to build the most lethal—and irresponsible—weapon in history. It had a deceptively mild-sounding name, the Supersonic Low Altitude Missile, or SLAM. Had the United States actually built this thing, it would have created the world’s first, and possibly last, nuclear-powered nuclear weapon.



The vintage video below lays out the story. The U.S. Air Force wanted a third weapon in addition to its intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombers for delivering retaliatory strikes against the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear war. The result was SLAM, a nuclear-powered cruise missile that could fly for weeks on end before being summoned to rain hydrogen bombs behind enemy lines.

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Dubbed “The Big Stick” during a feasibility study, SLAM development was handed over to aerospace giant Convair. SLAM was envisioned as an air-breathing, nuclear powered cruise missile that would penetrate enemy airspace at low altitude, drop nuclear bombs on enemy targets, then make a suicidal plunge into a final target to contaminate the area with radioactivity. The Pentagon hoped to have the weapon ready by 1965, or six years after this film was made.

Launched by a booster rocket during a crisis, SLAM’s nuclear-powered ramjet engine would kick in once the missile reached sufficient speed. The missile could then cruise for days or weeks. SLAM would enter enemy airspace at an altitude of 1,000 feet or less at Mach 3.5 speeds, its unshielded nuclear reactor spewing radioactive contamination across its path.

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SLAM was designed to carry nuclear weapons or much more powerful thermonuclear bombs. The version in this video carried a single thermonuclear bomb warhead but could also carry smaller nuclear bombs, by some reports up to 26 nuclear bombs.

SLAM was cancelled in 1964 amid concerns about its cost-effectiveness and viability. The missile, which was intentionally designed to spew lethal radiation across its path, would have been very difficult to test (although most individual components, including the reactor, were successfully prototyped). The missile would eventually have to crash land, creating a radioactive disaster. Finally, ICBMs, for all their flaws, could deliver nuclear warheads faster and had already been developed.

SLAM was unofficially the worst nuclear weapon ever developed. At least, until news in 2015 that Russia was working on the nuclear tidal wave-inducing Kanyon/Status-6 weapon.

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