Archive photo via OpenNet

The 1950s and '60s were a golden age of nuclear weapons design. Scientists and technicians at the Los Alamos and Sandia nuclear weapons laboratories succeeded in miniaturizing the so-called "physics packages" at the core of atomic bombs from the nearly 10,000-plus-pound behemoth used in the first-ever nuclear test to smaller warheads that could fit atop a missile. And their colleagues in rocketry surged ahead in developing land- and submarine-launched ballistic missiles that, together with bombers, soon made up the nuclear "triad" supporting strategic deterrence against the Soviets.

From the Army's perspective, the problem was that bombers and missiles were managed by the Air Force and the Navy, leaving the ground force out of arguably the most significant development in the history of war, even as its soldiers would be chiefly responsible for stopping a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Fortunately for the Army, many U.S. strategists still saw nukes simply as bigger conventional bombs, and America's post-Hiroshima mastery of the cutting-edge science of atomic destruction had filled weapons designers more with a sense of the possible than the prudent. The result was a series of odd creations that made their way into the Army's arsenal, from atomic artillery to nuclear-tipped air-defense missiles.

In a 1969 study, the U.S. Army tows an M-60 tank from a crater created by a simulated half-kiloton ADM blast to test the difficulty the weapons would pose to the movement of enemy forces. Photo from 1969 Army study "Project Tank Trap"

The Army began rolling out atomic demolition munitions (ADMs) in 1954. The early iterations were cumbersome weapons, weighing hundreds of pounds and requiring several men to carry them with the help of trucks and helicopters. They were intended mostly for what you might call nuclear landscaping -- to create irradiated, impassible craters or to collapse mountainsides into narrow passes in order to obstruct likely invasion routes and bottleneck enemy forces. One engineer recalls setting up an ADM in the middle of a forest: "The idea was to blow these trees across a valley to create a radioactive physical obstacle for vehicles and troops to get by," he said.

The Army's countermobility field manual taught soldiers to use ADMs for "stream cratering," in which atomic explosions near small waterways would "form a temporary dam, create a lake, cause overbank flooding, and produce an effective water obstacle" for enemy forces.2

An Army field manual for the Employment of Atomic Demolition Munitions. FP scans from FM 5-26 manual

If worst came to worst, the Army's atomic engineers planned to deny advancing forces the use of friendly infrastructure by destroying allied bridges, tunnels, and dams. Railroad yards, power plants, airports -- all were ripe targets for preemptive nuclear destruction.

But the Army wanted a more proactive nuclear role as well. Army partisans argued that the doctrine of massive retaliation left America unprepared for the full spectrum of conflict. Documents from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) show that America's nuclear weapons developers were happy to support the Army's quest for tactical nukes. In 1957, according to an AEC history, Sandia Corporation President James McRae lamented that "indiscriminate use of high- yield nuclear weapons inevitably created adverse public opinion." Since the future of war lay in an "unending succession of brushfire wars, rather than large-scale conflicts," McRae recommended that "greater emphasis should be placed on small atomic weapons," which could be used in "local ground combat."

McRae's urgings paved the way for the development of the Davy Crockett, a sub-kiloton-yield nuclear rocket that could fit on the back of a jeep. In 1958, when the Army came knocking for an atomic demolition munition that could be carried by a single soldier, the AEC looked to the Crockett's lightweight Mark 54 warhead for its solution. The resulting weapon would be a smaller, more mobile version of the ADMs. The Army, though, would have to share the device with the Navy and Marine Corps.

The AEC's final product -- the B-54 Special Atomic Demolition Munition -- entered the U.S. arsenal in 1964. It stood 18 inches tall, encased in an aluminum and fiberglass frame. It rounded to a bullet shape on one end and had a 12-inch- diameter control panel on the other. According to an Army manual, the weapon's maximum explosive yield was less than 1 kiloton -- that is, the equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT. To protect the bomb from unauthorized use, the SADM's control panel was sealed by a cover plate secured by a combination lock. Glow-in-the-dark paint applied to the lock allowed troops to unlock the bomb at night.

As Soviet forces advanced into such countries as West Germany, the SADM would allow Special Forces units (dubbed "Green Light" teams) to deploy behind enemy lines to destroy infrastructure and matériel. But their mission wouldn't have been limited to NATO countries alone. What many nuclear historians don't realize is that Special Forces Green Light teams were also prepared to use SADMs on territory of the Warsaw Pact itself in order to thwart an invasion. The teams prepared to destroy enemy airfields, tank depots, nodes in the anti- aircraft grid, and any potentially useful transportation infrastructure in order to mitigate the flood of enemy armor and to allow allied air power to punch through. According to an internal report, the Army also considered burying SADMs next to enemy bunkers "to destroy critical field command and communications installations."

Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces were trained to reach their targets by air, land, and sea. They could parachute behind enemy lines from cargo planes or helicopters.

Teams specializing in scuba missions could swim the bomb to its destination if necessary.

Teams specializing in scuba missions could swim the bomb to its destination if necessary3. (The AEC built an airtight, pressurized case that allowed divers to submerge the bomb to depths of up to 200 feet.) One Special Forces team even trained to ski with the weapon in the Bavarian Alps, though not without some difficulty. "It skied down the mountain; you did not," said Bill Flavin, who commanded a Special Forces SADM team. "If it shifted just a little bit, that was it. You were out of control on the slopes with that thing."

Special Forces thus turned to teams trained in special high-altitude parachute jumps and scuba diving to deliver the weapon. Team leaders were allowed to choose which of their men would receive training on the weapon in order to make sure their units could pass the Army's periodic, demanding nuclear surety inspections. "The people with the best records, the people with the most experience, usually ended up on the SADM team because they had to pass the surety inspection," said Flavin. To receive SADM qualification, soldiers also had to be screened through the Defense Department's personnel reliability program to make sure they were trustworthy and mentally stable.

Some men approached for the mission were gung-ho; others were less so.

Colonel Tom Davis (ret.) led a SADM team while serving in the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne). Photo courtesy of Tom Davis

"Of course everybody would volunteer. That wasn't a problem," said Capt. Davis. "We did it because, hey, it was gee-whiz. It was a neat thing to do, and I wanted to learn about it." But when Green Light team member Ken Richter began interviewing potential candidates, he said, not everyone was as enthusiastic: "I had a lot of people that I interviewed for our team. Once they found out what the mission was, they said, 'No, thanks. I'd rather go back to Vietnam.'"

When he was introduced to the weapon, Richter could hardly believe what the AEC had come up with. "I think that my first reaction was that I didn't believe it," he said. "Because everything that I'd seen prior to that, World War II, showed this huge weapon. And we were going to put it on our backs and carry it? I thought they were joking."

They were not. Special Forces SADM teams like Davis's were given a weeklong course comprising eight to 12 hours of instruction each day in a cinder-block classroom at Fort Benning, Ga. The teams would also receive periodic refresher training from the Special Forces SADM committee, composed of SADM-qualified senior noncommissioned officers, and they were subject to regular inspections to evaluate their fitness in handling nuclear weapons. But given the stakes, the training did not always inspire tremendous confidence.

Soldiers receive classroom instruction in the use of Medium Atomic Demolition Munitions or "MADMs." MADM -- SADM's big sister -- weighed in at a hefty 400 pounds and required a team of engineers to carry it with the help of a help of a helicopter or truck. The MADM had a larger, variable yield of 1-15 kilotons and could be triggered by timers, wire, or radio. From the Collection of Larry Fukalek, retired ADM engineer, 2th Engineer Battalion, 7th Infantry Division

For a nuclear weapon, the bomb was compact and light, but as infantry equipment went, it was still heavy and ungainly, its weight often suddenly shifting against a carrier's back. "When [the jumpmaster] said, 'Go,' they kinda tossed me out of the airplane with it on me," recalled Danny Powers, a communications sergeant with a SADM team.

When hauling the weapons on foot, things were even more difficult. Dan Dawson, an ADM engineer, remembers how difficult it was to run with a backpack nuke. During a training exercise, his unit simulated a mission to blow up a railroad tunnel but found it difficult to move a SADM across a patch of open ground. "To get [the SADM backpacker] across this open area in a hurry, two of us, one on each side, had to support him under his arms and trot with him across this open area. You could carry it, but you couldn't run with it."

In addition, the two-man rule, which to this day dictates that no individual service member have the ability to arm a nuclear weapon, demanded that Green Light teams divide the code that unlocked the cover plate. But that could present a challenge if the wrong man got killed en route to the target. "Here you were with this hunk of shit in your bag and no good place to go," Flavin said. "So we said, 'Eh, I don't think we can allow that to happen,'" and his men agreed to share the code in the event of a real mission.

It was not as if the men could leave the SADM behind if a mission went bad. The weapon's unique power meant that it could not be allowed to fall into enemy hands, and the cover plates, secured by a single combination lock, didn't provide much protection if enemy forces captured a SADM team. "A crowbar can pop that thing off," said Flavin. So the teams trained to scuttle the weapon. "We always had to carry the appropriate amount of explosives so we could destroy it without it going off," Powers explained. "It might scatter nuclear waste, but it would not go up like a real mushroom cloud."

If the team reached the target, the men would remove the lock-secured cover plate and set the timers. They would then reach into the safe well -- a small compartment in the top left of the control panel -- and pull out a hand-sized explosive charge used to trigger the bomb's nuclear chain reaction. After placing the charge in the armed position and flipping the switch, they would beat a hasty retreat.

Of course, in the hours or minutes before detonation, the bomb would be exposed to discovery and tampering from enemy troops, so some Special Forces teams were told they had to keep eyes on the weapon until just minutes before it detonated. The "proper" distance to ensure both the security of the weapon and the safety of the team varied by nuclear surety inspector, recalled Frank Antenori, who served as an Army nuclear weapons maintenance technician for a Special Forces team before earning decorations for valor as a Green Beret in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some inspectors told teams to get out of the area as soon as the weapon was in place; others insisted that the team had to stay within visual range of the weapon until it blew.

Even at a "safe" distance, SADM teams would still find themselves uncomfortably close to a detonation. "We're outside the vaporization range," said Antenori, "but well within the 'I will feel the wonderful warm wind that will blow by when it goes off in a second' range."

Heightening the absurdity of intentionally huddling near a nuclear weapon that was about to explode was the fact that the men could not know exactly when it would explode. Probably to make the weapon resistant to electromagnetic pulses from any nearby nuclear explosions, as one might expect at the outset of war with the Soviets, the AEC had fashioned the SADM largely devoid of electronics. Instead, the device relied on two mechanical timers that, unfortunately, became less accurate the longer they were set for, potentially going off as early as eight minutes ahead of schedule or as many as 13 behind. Army field manuals warned that it was "not possible to state that [the timers] will fire at a specific time," so SADM teams were trained to predict the general window in which the weapon would go off.

Nevertheless, Powers said, "we always figured we'd go through all these meticulous procedures on this device, set the timer for several hours to get away, but really when we turned that button, we were going to disappear."

If the Green Light teams were lucky enough to be alive after the weapon detonated, the odds were still heavily stacked against their survival. Behind enemy lines and cut off from support at the start of the Third World War, they would have to rely on their wits and their escape and evasion training to avoid being captured or killed. Some provisions were made for them: Special Forces fleeing a SADM detonation could seek out weapons and supply caches hidden across Eastern Europe and marked on special maps. "When the [Berlin] Wall came down, we serviced and pulled some of those [caches] out," recalled Flavin. "I was surprised; the weapons and everything were still good to go."

Julius Reinitzer, known to his colleagues as "The Bear." A Czechoslovak-born Special Forces sergeant, Reinitzer advised SADM troops about how to stay alive behind enemy lines. Photo courtesy of Ilona Reinitzer

In addition to their caches, some SADM teams had access to another secret weapon to help them get home: a Czechoslovak- born Special Forces sergeant by the name of Julius Reinitzer. As a teenager, Reinitzer twice busted out of a Nazi labor camp in Poland. He would later link up with U.S. military intelligence, hopping across the Czechoslovak border to set up resistance networks. After his arrest and imprisonment in communist Czechoslovakia for espionage, again he escaped. Back in the free world, Reinitzer joined the U.S. Army, earning American citizenship and becoming a Green Beret. "The Bear," as he was known, grew to be an in-demand tutor to Special Forces teams, including Flavin and his men, who were looking for a master class in the delicate art of living life on the run behind the Iron Curtain.

Still, the notion that Green Light missions were in all likelihood one- way trips didn't escape members of the Special Forces world. Flying through enemy airspace, operating covertly behind the lines, sneaking up on hostile forces with a nuclear weapon, and waiting uncomfortably close to the bomb before it exploded -- the missions were nothing short of preposterous. As Flavin put it: "There were real issues with the operational wisdom of the program, and those who were to conduct the mission were sure that whomever thought this up was using bad hemp."

Humor cushioned the grim realities of working with atomic demolition munitions. The ADM engineer units created patches and logos adorned with mushroom clouds. An unofficial motto sprung up among them: "Nuke 'em 'til they glow, and shoot 'em in the dark." The joking was made easier by the fact that some thought that the chances of the chain of command authorizing a mission were slim.

"In our hearts, we knew nobody was going to give control of these to a bunch of big old boys running around the countryside. We just didn't believe it was ever going to happen."

"In our hearts, we knew nobody was going to give control of these to a bunch of big old boys running around the countryside," said Davis. "We just didn't believe it was ever going to happen."

Aside from the "operational wisdom" of the program, as Flavin dryly put it, some Special Forces teams questioned whether their delivery aircraft, much less the weapon itself, would even reach them in the chaos and destruction of the Third World War's opening act. The SADM units rarely, if ever, had access to the live weapons themselves, which were held in tightly controlled storage depots, like the Army's facility in Miesau, West Germany. In the event of war, the weapons would be flown from their storage depots to nearby airfields and the Special Forces SADM teams waiting for them there. Flavin summed up the challenges well: "So you had to get us somewhere. You had to get the weapon somewhere. You had to get the airplane somewhere. And all of this had to be done when? Supposedly before the other side knew that they were going to attack, I guess."

Political sensitivities posed an obstacle as well. NATO allies, particularly West Germany, were understandably apprehensive about the idea of U.S. forces lighting off scores of small nuclear weapons on their territory. Engineers were supposed to use the weapons only after local populations had been evacuated, but that requirement didn't settle nerves. Burying the weapons underground would help limit radioactive fallout, but the Federal Republic publicly balked when the United States asked for permission to pre-dig emplacement holes for nuclear weapons near its transportation infrastructure.