Slashdot Mirror
British Chicken-Warmed Nuke
darrellberry writes "During the Cold War, British researchers developed a nuclear landmine, kept operational during cold conditions by packing it full of live chickens. This story has appeared in a few UK media channels this morning. Probably an April Fools', but who knows? The bomb is supposedly on display at the National Archives in Kew, so if you live in London you can go and see for yourselves..." Also a BBC story and an older New Scientist blurb.
The BBC are running a separate 'this is true, honest' story, detailing other unlikely stories alongside... I like the fact that one of our railways cost more than a trip to the moon.
Only in the UK...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
(british broadsheet), is also doing an 'honest guv' type story: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1058550, 00.html
Everyone knows that lawyers and politicians are more effective heat sources.
"Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair." A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick
Right up there with the spaghetti harvest.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
...good for dept?
Uhm, yes. They don't make very good boomerangs.
Or coffee filters. Or baseball gloves. (Although that one would be fun)
Sent from your iPad.
This BBC story says that "Plans to fill a nuclear landmine with chickens to regulate its temperature were considered during the Cold War. Officials at the National Archives say it is coincidence the secret plan was revealed on 1 April."
I, for one, welcome our nuclear chicken overlords...
I feel like chicken tonight....like radioactive chicken tonight....chicken tonight!
Other news sources are quite adament it is not an April fool joke
Times
So, the chickens have seed to eat, but what about air and water? So, either an okay april fool's joke, or a really stupid plan. :-)
What is the diffference between April Fool's Day and every other day on Slashdot?
On April fools day, everyone knows slashdot will be full of useless information. Every other day, the editors aren't aware fo this fact.
My father worked (among the other 10,000) engineers in Oakridge, TN, during WWII and they frequently packed delicate nulcear instruments in popcorn (dry popped, no salt or butter) simply because it worked well and was easy to dispose of.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The civil service has obviously had access to these documents for a while, so why do they have to "announce" these apparently real plans on April 1st and then get all irritable and have to deny repeatedly that its an april fools joke.
Why didn't they release the story yesterday, or couldn't they have waited until tomorrow?
Mustm orrowwwww......
Stop
Reading
Slashdot
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Until
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To
Download my free songs!
I can't think that a terrified flock of irradiated chickens would produce more heat than something like a quantity of Pu-238 or Pu-240, the former of which is quoted as producing 1/2 watt of heat per gram...nor would they be as durable.
Way off-topic, but who cares, its a holiday...
"What if we celebrated Valentine's Day with chickens instead of hearts? Then we'd say, 'I love you, with all my chicken.'"
- Sesame Street
Because the ... *BOOM*
Isn't the point of a landmine to explode right under a group of people? Why does it matter if the charge is a nuclear detonation. As long as the people you are trying to nuke are withing a mile of the explosion, you're probably going to get them. Why not just do a remote control or timed device and save yourself all the hassle?
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
"The seven-ton weapon, codenamed Blue Peacock" ...burying a flock of chickens with the landmine in order to keep it warm."
"
A bunch of chicks keeping a male Peacock warm. Try to get That out of your mind now...
This story is worse than Duke Nukem's Plutonium Pack. ...and what happens when you nuke radioactive chicken $hit?
Hooray for British ingenuity - now we're making our own Chicken a la Kiev, faithful even down to the rad count...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Ah. I always wondered about the origin of Cluckzilla, who ravaged Leeds during the late 1960s.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I smell a PITA protest......
Seymour Cray would've used oxen to warm his nuclear landmine.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
"Are you suggesting nuclear bombs migrate?"
"Not at all. They could be carried...."
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
If this were true, I can already imagine Soviet army personel encountering this weapon:
Soviet private: In the name of Lenin, what's that awful noise?Soviet sergeant: It sounds like... Oh no...
Soviet private: Chickens? A whole bunch of chickens?
Soviet sergeant: PULL BACK!!! Tell Dmitri to launch all ICBMs! Get me in contact with the Kremlin!
Soviet private: What? They're going to peck us to death?
Soviet sergeant: Silence, cappitalist pig! Those anglobastards witll suffer for their foul crime!
Hate me!
I don't have a link to it, but there was that one bird that got hit by a fastball...
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Looks like this is one story that really laid an egg.
(Unless of course the radiation would make the chickens sterile.)
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I know this is true, of course, because I heard about this already from a friend of a friend who swears he has a friend that worked on this! Ya...
Hi. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such British atomic chicken films as "Night of the Peckus" and "5,000,000 Feathers to Earth".
Look for these Lord Low Grade productions on an MST3K showing near you. Me? I'm the one who is always hidden by the shadow of Crow T Robot's head.
I think everyone's overlooking the very real possibility that these chickens were used for more than just heat.
Like styrofoam in the H-bomb, this seemingly innocuous packing material (chickens) might be converted to plasma by radiation pressure, thereby dramatically increasing the explosive yield of the device.
Just wait. I give it 20 years, and we'll see these docs declassified. Of course, then we'll have to worry about rogue states building C-bombs.
of chickens!
Eat at Joe's.
I have heard of the nuclear landmines in a non-April 1st context before, so I think the underlying story is probably true. The idea is that there are some bottlenecks which an advancing Soviet force, particularly tanks, would have to pass through (bridges etc). Why send aircraft to bomb them at great risk when you could put the bomb in place at your lesiur. 10kt is not a particularly big nuke, anyway. I don't think the radiation part was intentional - it is the reason the idea got canned. If they had a "clean" bomb, they might still be there.
It goes along with thinking at the time: they were also training troops go hide as the battlefromt passed over them, the re-emerge to harrass the enemy rear and lines of communication.
The chickens, however, are probably someone's April Fool addition.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I wonder if the bomb is triggered when one of those chickens lays an egg.
but my legs have atrophied as an unfortunate side effect of my slashdottery.
1)chickens are living organisms, how are they to survive while being barried underground? if they put the chickens down they would put them down at the same time as the bomb...and the chickens can survive through the winter?? They should try to survive any day before a winter day
WoW: Scheod 70 orc warlock on Shadowmoon
Didn't the local theater owners get upset when workers brought in popcorn for 'disposal' and it glowed in the dark?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The page also shows a SADM - the nuclear demolition charge intended for use by parachute dropped saboteurs. The SADM's W54 warhead was the smallest and lightest developed by the US and was also used in theDavey Crockett 'nuclear bazooka' and the AIM 26-A nuclear air-to-air missile.
That ranks up there to, "Car Alarms cause more thefts than they prevent".. Sounds right, but isn't. -DB in 2004
Does all the included chicken poop make this a dirty bomb?
1) Radioactive material tends to be self-heating. That's why you can run a power station off it.
2) A solid steel container, buried underground for a week. How do you train a chicken to hold it's breath, and how long can it do so for?
3) According to the NewScientist article, "If disturbed or damaged, they were primed to explode within 10 seconds". Surely chickens *inside* the thing would disturb it, and set it off?
However, a quick office poll still reveals 50-50 support for the idea. Whatever happens, half the office will get laughed at tomorrow...:)
The United States also designed, manufactured and deployed nuclear landmines during the Cold War. See here for some pictures.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Why couldn't they just order a really big chicken hat to fit around the landmine and spare all those innocent chickens?! It looks much warmer than a real chicken anyway!
And remember: "A fowl is a terrible thing to waste"
A 1944 design for a pigeon-guided missile, that was to be used to sink German battleships. Until the Navy decided it was a stupid idea.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I took a grad-level physics-based electromagnetism class last year, and picked up some supplementary E&M books from the library. One of them was from an engineering slant, and actually described the following problem and it's solution.
Farmers wanted a way to keep pigs warm in the winter. So they estimated the thickness of a layer of fat under the pig's skin, determined permittivities and permeabilities of the fat and the muscle-layers underneath the fat, and solved the boundary conditions of Maxwell's equations in the presence of RF radiation.
The result was that they effectively made a low-cost 'microwave oven' tuned to the pig's fat layer, which would keep them warm and still be relatively cheap (ie, put the heater in the pen without worrying about walls, etc).
Kind of cool, but disturbing in a way too.
make world, not war
Well, Google, for one. The weapon didn't use chickens, but was kept warm by glass fibre, apparently, according to the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment. (PDF).
...Think of the bandwidth you could get with those pigeons, instead!0 3/31/2b224227&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=133&tid=186& tid=95)
(http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/
Wouldn't the clucking sound give away it's position to the enemy?
Just feed the popcorn to the chickens. Done and done!
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
If I were a politician, I'd release potentially embarrassing information on April First, along with as many amazing and unlikely details as possible. Enough people would probably be skeptical to mute the public response. Have a story about burying nuclear landmines in Germany? Just add chickens to the story, and it'll make a brief splash in the humor section before disappearing.
Or baseball gloves. (Although that one would be fun)
It depends on where you plan putting your hand...
Then again, you might have a different idea of fun than me.
Please dupe this story over and over...
Now even non-subscribers can read the upcoming stories early
1. stuff chickern in nuke
2. boom
3. cooked chicken bits
4. cure world hunger
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
This was obviously designed by German nuclear scientist Otto Hahn.
Nice choice for a Brit: nuke some German town or clean up chicken shit.
After winning the war using this weapon the Brits would not have to send in much help to the conquered survivors. Hot roasted chicken just falls out of the sky. And it is easy to find in the dark too.
I was there at the National Archives, yesterday (March 31st), when this new 'discovery' was announced. This story sounds generally plausible (certainly there was a lot of other wacky stuff that happened in this period) but the anouncement was carried off with such a light touch that I honestly don't know if it's a prank or not.
I can, however, verify one or two things:
Blue Peacock was -not- on display a the National Archives, as the Slashdot story suggests. There is, in fact, another thermo-nuclear bomb there.
I have not seen the documentation behind the chickens claim, although plausible looking documents were brandished at the audience. We were told that the discovery was 'too recent' for documents to have been coppied for us in time.
If this is a prank, several famous and important Cold War and Secret World historians have been taken in. Most of the people I spoke to were utterly convinced that Prof Hennesy was telling the truth.
The text reported to us was in just the right style to be a genuine document. On the other hand, Prof Hennessy and his team are the world's leading experts in this field, so you'd expect them to get it right.
I got the impression that this was not a fully fleshed-out plan, but an idea mooted by some engineer which rated a single paragraph in a much longer document.
If, indeed, this document has been shown around, that would mean that it is almost certainly genuine. As Prof Hennessy pointed out, why would the provide many pages of highly technical writing for such a joke? On the other hand, I have not seen these documents and have not spoken, personally, to anyone who has.
Either way, hats of to Petter Hennessy and the Secret State reserch team at Queen Mary.
...but I don't think I ever chickened a nuke.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
...given that limpet mines originally had fuses made from condoms and aniseed balls.
Boring Old Fart (40, married, 3 kids...er no...make that 49, married, 3 grown up kids...it's been a long time)
It was a `landmine' designed to be set on a timer to ambush the Soviets as they advanced across Europe. It was based on the Blue Danube device that was the UK's first air-delivered nuclear weapon (essentially, they removed the fins).
The device had up to an 8-day timer, but could also be set off locally --- either by booby trap, incase it was discovered, or a trigger. Amusingly there was a 10 second delay when you operated the trigger, just time to duck and cover :o)
The chickens, though? That's clearly a hoax. Apart from anything else, the device was air and water tight.
Those who go to the display will see the following sign: "I am the one guy in the civil service with a sense of humour."
Don't ask how I know.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Nukes dont need to be kept warm, they generate heat all by themselves.
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
It seems that Duke University has bought the Public Domain for $2.2 trillion. In response the Ibiblio director, a University of North Carolina employee, is moving to Duke. Also MS, SC0 and Disney are merging in response to the Duke purchase.
I thought it was funny...
I got a tour of this thing at Aldermaston last November by an old guy that worked on it. I thought it was funny then. (So was the old guy) Chicken powerer nuclear landmines usually are funny though...
1. 10 Sharks with lasers(protection) 1 million 2. 1 nuclear chicken. 2 dollars Faces on the masses when the chicken lays an egg. PRICELESS.
awwww, the purple-haired moonbabes are getting all pouty now!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I never realized my browser could read "William Shatner" tags..
But if you find one with a pulley in the middle it may come in handy...
Go Guybrush!
Unfortunately I don't have a source to cite, but apparently in Ireland our new light rail system in Dublin has cost 600m euro, and the cost of one mars rover was over $300m
*shrug*
Cause it gives you: CHICKEN KIEV!!! That, for me, suggests it's a hoax... Future Shock
THAW THE CHICKEN, as many of you know from the train story.
Either the wayback machine never archived the articles, or theyre both new =)
. uk /1/hi/uk/3588465.stm
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://news.bbc.co
In Soviet Russia chicken's nuke you!!!!!
*uses flame broiled chicken shield*
ok now i feel better
And how would we know?
As I pointed out a couple of days ago - read the headlines for the past year. It reads like the Onion on crystal meth.
SCO claims complete ownership over Linux, charges $699/license.
Martha Stewart goes to prison!
Darl McBride calls GPL unconstitutional, petitions Congress for redress.
California town takes steps to ban styrofoam cups due to environmental concerns about DHMO used in manufacturing process.
A soft drink flavoured with turkey and gravy, which even its creator admits is undrinkable, has become a surprise hit ahead of the US Thanksgiving holiday.
What the fuck? We're not celebrating April 1st, 2004, we're celebrating April 367th, 2003.
Flash Fried.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
The reverse situation actually happened in New Mexico. A nuclear device got TOO hot. As part of Project Plowshare, operation "Gasbuggy" was an underground detonation of a nuclear fission device to see if it natural gas would be released from the surrounding rock strata. The test didn't go exactly according to plan. I quote from the web site:
QUOTE
After a number of dry runs, a canister containing the bomb and associated hardware was lowered into the 4200' well and the hole cemented shut. Within hours, a water pump at the bottom of the well quit working. This caused an air conditioning system cooling the bomb to flood and stop working. The temperature at the bottom of the well soared to over 200 degrees. Workers abandoned the site because no one, not even the lab scientists knew what might happen to a nuclear bomb drowning in boiling water. All the public knew was that the test was "delayed."
After several nerve-racking weeks lab employees crept back into the area. After taking some readings they made a decision to try and set the bomb off. Everyone was cleared from the area. Spectators were kept more than five miles back. Holcomb and other managers moved to a command tent for the countdown, the result of which was, at that point, anyone's guess.
The bomb exploded. Closed circuit television cameras on site recorded a seven foot ground wave--the ground and trees and everything in the vicinity rising and falling like an ocean wave. Two and a half miles away from the blast Holcomb and the others were thrown from their folding metal chairs when the wave hit.
UNQUOTE
More information about Operation Gasbuggy can be found here:
Gasbuggy
-- SKYKING, SKYKING, DO NOT ANSWER.
"Hawkings describes their plans for deploying the weapons in the event of an imminent Soviet invasion as "somewhat theatrical". One problem was that the mines might not work in winter if they became too cold, so the army proposed wrapping them in fibreglass pillows.
In the end, the risk from radioactive fallout would have been "unacceptable", says Hawkings, and hiding nuclear weapons in an allied country was deemed "politically flawed". As a result, the Ministry of Defence cancelled Blue Peacock in February 1958. " -- New Scientist 16 July 03
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Would that have made chicken kiev?
)no offense intended to russian comrades(
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
I can't believe they even bother including a funny section on front page today? I mean, how explicit do you have to be???
The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life.
"Keeping Blue Peacock warm involved swathing it in glass fibre pillows. "
9 92 .pdf
http://www.awe.co.uk/Images/blue_peacock_tcm6-1
I hate to ruin a good joke, I was loving every moment of it, too.
Hawkings describes their plans for deploying the weapons in the event of an imminent Soviet invasion as "somewhat theatrical". One problem was that the mines might not work in winter if they became too cold, so the army proposed wrapping them in fibreglass pillows.
I smell an April-fools' winking at something really nasty in the history of the UK. A mine of any kind is a disgusting thing, let alone a nuke-mine.
It was a dove, 90mph fastball thrown by Randy Johnson, AKA the big unit. E-mail or IM me if you want the video, its all over p2p too.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
You don't need chickens to heat an atomic device. The decay in the "physics package" will heat the rest of the components. All they needed to do was insulate it well enough; which would surely be easier than stuffing it full of chickens.
So, essentially they're developing a living inverse-heat engine. You input work and energy and it puts out heat. Up to 90% efficency!
I'm going to run back to the lab to finish my research on a "Universal Heat Death Accelerator". With this I'll be able to destory the entire universe at once and I'll keep warm in the process (well, as warm as everybody else). I just need to apply for that DARPA grant.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
wtf.
wtf again...more like Offtopic than anything else.