Quote:
Originally Posted by Sooner or later
Atomic Annie lives about 3 miles north of me.  |
Cool!
Nuclear weapons safety was a little bit stretchy during the cold war. Rounds for Ms Annie, referenced above, had a significantly non-zero chance of going critical in the barrel for example. In general, all of the artillery rounds had to make some pretty big compromises to do what they needed to do. In a few cases there may have been "oh carp! - we should go out and render them safe before bad things happen" moments.
I worked with a few Army vets, from back when the US Army had nukes, and I guess Annie was deployed to Europe but couldn't fit down most of the narrow roads. I think it was the only above-ground tested artillery piece - though we did shoot the Davey Crockett recoiless rocket/i.e. "Bazooka".
And for something closer to the Genie, you can visit the Nike battery in Marin. It's been restored and is operational-ish, as in that the missile elevators and erectors work. Sobering to realize how many of these were clustered around nearly every major city or industrial facility back in the 1960s. We toured that one about ten years ago and they still had some site vets providing talks. Thankfully their service at the battery was boring but they'd happily discuss "lighting up" incoming airliners with the anti-aircraft radar just for something to do on a long boring night.