UK’S CHICKEN-​​POWERED NUKE

Like me, you’ve prob­a­bly stayed awake count­less nights won­der­ing, “Did the Brits ever make plans for a nuclear land­mine, pow­ered by chick­ens?“
Well, dear reader, I’m here to tell you that the answer is yes. At least, accord­ing to the UK’s National Archives.

Conceived dur­ing the Cold War, the seven tonne device was the size of small truck and was designed to be buried or sub­merged by a British Army retreat­ing from Soviet forces. The land­mine had a plu­to­nium core sur­rounded by high explo­sive and would have been det­o­nated by remote con­trol or timer, caus­ing mass destruc­tion and con­t­a­m­i­na­tion over a wide area to pre­vent sub­se­quent enemy occu­pa­tion.
Scientists work­ing on the project realised that the bomb could fail in win­ter if vital com­po­nents become too cold, so they explored ways of keep­ing the inner work­ings warm. One pro­posal put for­ward con­sisted of fill­ing the cas­ing of the nuke with live chick­ens, who would give off suf­fi­cient heat, prior to suf­fo­cat­ing or starv­ing to death, to keep the del­i­cate explo­sive mech­a­nism from freez­ing. Despite the poten­tial impor­tance of chick­ens to the project, the mine was code­named ‘Blue Peacock’.

“The mines were to be left buried or sub­merged by the British Army of the Rhine. They would then have been det­o­nated by wire from up to five kilo­me­tres away or by an eight-​​day clock­work timer. If dis­turbed or dam­aged, they were primed to explode within 10 sec­onds,” New Scientist explains.

Each mine was expected to pro­duce an explo­sive yield of 10 kilo­tons, about half that of the atom bomb the US dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945…
Blue Peacock was to con­sist of a plu­to­nium core sur­rounded by a sphere of high explo­sives, all encased in steel. The design was based on Blue Danube, a free-​​fall nuclear bomb weigh­ing sev­eral tonnes that was already in ser­vice with the Royal Air Force. But Blue Peacock, weigh­ing over seven tonnes, would have been much more cum­ber­some.
The steel cas­ing was so large that it had to be tested out­doors in a flooded gravel pit near Sevenoaks in Kent. If ques­tions were asked, Nuclear his­to­rian David Hawkings says the army’s cover story was that it was a con­tainer for “an atomic power unit for troops in the field”. In July 1957, army lead­ers decided to order 10 Blue Peacock mines and to sta­tion them in Germany.
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. (via Linkfilter and Improbable Research)

April 14th, 2005 | Bizarro | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.