by PAUL HUARD

Early in the Cold War, NATO worried that thousands of Russian tanks might pour through the Fulda Gap—the lowland corridor between Frankfurt and the East German border—and overwhelm alliance forces.

The Warsaw Pact’s advantage in armor was huge. Some intelligence analysts predicted that a single NATO battalion— 300 0r 400 troops and 40 or 50 fighting vehicles—could face as many as 120 advancing Soviet tanks within 30 minutes. And there would be even more follow-on forces behind the initial armored wave.

So many Soviet tanks could roll into West Germany that some NATO planners grimly joked—or half-joked—that their war strategy was to “fall back to the Pyrenees and go nuclear.”

From 1961 to 1967, one way U.S. forces could “go nuclear” in Europe was tiny … and unnerving for its own users. The Davy Crockett was a recoilless rifle that fired a 76-pound atomic projectile—the smallest, lightest nuke ever deployed by the United States.

It was a classic example of why in some cases size doesn’t matter. In an age before modern anti-tank missiles, the Davy Crockett was a battlefield equalizer designed to fry enemy tank crews with gamma rays and help stop a Soviet invasion cold.

In theory. In practice, it never would have worked.

Beginning with the administration of Pres. Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, the U.S. deployed many nuclear weapons to Western Europe, ranging from gravity bombs to intermediate-range ballistic missiles based in the U.K and West Germany.

But there was also a growing feeling among planners and some politicians on both sides of the Atlantic that if annihilating cities and military installations was the only nuclear option, then the Soviets gained a battlefield advantage.

In principle if not in reality, NATO could detonate tactical nuclear weapons without wiping out huge swaths of Europe.

Advocates of small nukes maintained that tactical atomic weapons would boost deterrence—the Soviets would be less inclined to launch an invasion if they knew NATO could nuke their tanks.

The designers of the Davy Crockett used an existing fission device as the basis of its W-54 warhead. The W-54 was tiny compared to other nuclear weapons of the time, but that didn’t make it less deadly, according to Carey Sublette, a nuclear weapons historian and creator of The Nuclear Weapon Archive.

“By their nature, all very small nuclear weapons have a larger ‘kill radius’ from the radiation emitted instantly by the nuclear explosion than from blast or thermal radiation flash,” Sublette told War Is Boring.

“Armor provides essentially complete protection against blast and thermal radiation,” Sublette continued. “It attenuates but does not stop ionizing radiation, so the explosion would irradiate and eventually kill the crew inside the tank.”