It had a longer range than its blast radius. Supposedly, the pits were big enough to feel warm from decay all the time. An officer had to pull duty shifts near the weapons, so that if an alert came in they could hand-assemble them: placing the correct plutonium pits into the casings and getting them ready to go. But it was intended for much the same purpose: holding back the Soviets from coming through the Fulda Gap while NATO mobilized for World War III.įor safety reasons, it was stored unassembled. Someone I know trained to assemble and use the W33 nuclear artillery shell, which was a generation older than the W54 used in the Davy Crockett and SADM (it was a gun-type device and thus much larger). posted by the man of twists and turns (39 comments total) You can watch the Ivy Flats test film, but skip to 08:54 for the good stuff. The glowing heart of the SADM was the miniaturized W54 warhead, which also featured in the Davy Crockett recoilless rifle. Some of the 10th Special Forces Group's insignia have SADM-inspired elements. This was to destroy infrastructure or create impassable areas, in addition to use against formations of enemy troops. The SADM was designed to be delivered by parachutist, and placed behind enemy lines in event of Soviet attack.

'If that meant staying inside the hydroelectric plant, standing 20 feet away from the warhead, that's where you stayed,' a former trained SADM mission member told a Houston Chronicle reporter. While delivery and exfiltration was practiced: a newspaper article from 1994 - about five years after the SADM was withdrawn from the inventory - depicted a less Hollywood ending. The little ' backpack bomb', or ' suitcase nuke' was the Special Atomic Demolition Munition, or SADM (not Saddam).

Nuke them till they glow