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Nuke-Lobbing
SlideGuitar writes "The following is a fascinating article about how the Navy in the 1950s, wanting to assure that it had a carrier based nuclear force, used A1 Skyraider (single engine propellor driven aircraft) to lob nuclear bombs using a manuever called the "goofy loop" (read the article.) The goofy loop put about seven miles between them and a Mark 7 nuclear device at detonation. The pilots knew that (1) they couldn't get far enough away to survive, and (2) if they did survive there probably wouldn't be a carrier to go back to anyway. There are lots of emails from pilots who did the manuever and what they thought about the whole business."
Well, the guys who actually did it said that their bombs normally fell within 300ft of their targets.
Airspeed indicators can be pretty accurate.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You've got the cart before the horse. This maneuver was never considered for the small nukes, because they didn't exist. And why were the nukes so big way back then? Two reasons. It was harder to make small nukes. The backpack nuke was really hard to make compared to a multi-megaton monster. The other reason is that with inaccurate delivery systems you need big nukes to destroy a target if you miss it by 3 or 4 miles.
As the accuracy of missile systems crept up, the size of the nuke required went down. Now, we can drop a conventional bomb or 4 right through a specific window, so there's hardly any targets that cannot be destroyed by a conventional bomb.
Nukes are basically obsolete as battlefield weapons.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
That sounds like an awefully small yeild. I recall reading somewhere that it was the lowest possible yield they could acchive, but I've not been able to find that page again. I did however find this (curtesy of this page);
Back in the 1960s, American designers put together probably the coolest - yet also most suicidal - battlefield weapon ever built. It was a nuclear bazooka, capable of being operated by a pair of soldiers, and intended to be unleashed against Soviet battalions as they headed for Worthing-on-Sea.
The bazooka was given the patriotic codename 'Davy Crockett', presumably to encourage its operators to risk using it. Basically a scaled-up rifle grenade launcher which could either be hand-carried or mounted on a jeep, the initial Davy Crockett model had a maximum range of only two kilometres, later doubled to four. The minimum range was a suicidal 400 metres.
The tripod-mounted launcher fired a W-54 plutonium implosion bomb, the smallest nuclear weapon ever fielded by US forces. The egg-shaped atomic bomb weighed a portable 25 kilograms and had a selectable yield of either 10 or 20 tonnes. In blast terms that makes it only four times as powerful as the 1995 Oklahoma bombing device, but its wider radiation effects would inflict considerable fatalities. The Davy Crockett warhead had a timer fuse to be primed by its operators, who would have had to work out the time taken to reach its target.
One early firing of the Davy Crockett at the Nevada Test Site was witnessed by US Attorney General Robert Kennedy. From 1961 onwards 400 bazooka warheads were manufactured and deployed. However non-nuclear test firings of the Davy Crockett revealed the design had a targeting flaw and it was retired in 1971.
The W-54 bomb had another application, as an Atomic Demolition Munition (ADM). Planted in hidden chambers beneath Germany - to destroy or block access to Warsaw Pact forces - it could be carried on handles by an individual or a team using mounted poles. ADMs were only finally retired from service in 1989.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.