Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

The chicken feed actually served two purposes. The first is the obvious: It let you keep the “live” in your “live chickens.”

But secondly, it keeps your chickens from getting hungry and pecking away at the electronics and essential components of an armed nuclear weapon . Can you imagine if the British turned western Germany into a radioactive wasteland because one of their chickens pecked at the wrong wire? “My apologies, Fritz. We seem to have thrown a spanner in the works. You see, the chickens… now, this is quite embarrassing… were a bit famished. You might say they were peckish, ha! Sorry, chap, that might have been in poor taste.”

Or something like that.

If I haven’t just insulted you or all of your ancestors and you’re still with me, you might be asking, “What makes chickens such a good heat source?” That’s a great question! I asked it also, since, for some reason, my history PhD program entirely skipped the physiology of chickens.

Chickens are for eating, in breast, thigh, wing, or McNugget form. They aren’t usually tasked to provide thermoregulation for weapons of mass destruction.

I didn’t know why either, so I looked it up. Fortunately, science has the answer.

According to the University of Kentucky’s College of Agriculture, Food and Environment, chickens are something called “homeothermic.” This means that they produce and dissipate heat into their surroundings to maintain a constant body temperature. If the chicken’s body temperature is warmer than the air temperature of wherever it might be, the chicken will lose body heat—and consequentially, the air around the chicken will get warmer. This in itself is not something magical for just chickens. Most birds and mammals, including humans, are homeothermic. However (and this is a big however for our story), an adult chicken in its normal state walks around with a body temperature of between 105 and 107 degrees Fahrenheit. Stuck in a steel container in the middle of a central European winter, that means a lot of dissipating. Moreover, a chicken’s body temperature can drop to as low as 73 degrees before it freezes to death. So there’s plenty of heat to go around.

Maybe the mostamazing thing about the Blue Peacock program is that it wasn’t scrapped because of the chicken idea. No, that was considered completely reasonable by the British planners.

It was all the other stuff wrong with the project.

The British ended up building two Blue Peacock prototypes, but problems persisted. The thing was just way too big and way too heavy. It was a pain to move around, and secret testing was nearly impossible because of the size of the steel container. This was considered even more problematic when smaller and lighter warheads (such as the Red Beard) started to come online. There was also the fallout problem, which was twofold. Early warheads, like the Blue Danube used in Blue Peacock, were very dirty relative to modern weapons. That is to say, they released a ton of radiation. Combine this with a surface (or subsurface) detonation, which hurls tons of irradiated dirt and debris into the air, and the Blue Peacock design was operationally untenable, with or without the chickens.

But it was ultimately political obstacles that doomed this program. In February 1958, the British Ministry of Defence’s Weapons Policy Committee decided to end work on the Blue Peacock design. The mission requirement to pre-position the weapon at or near the eventual detonation site was a nonstarter for most European civilian populations. And why would they agree to this? It’s not like it was really going to protect their homes, neighborhoods, and nations against the Soviet threat.

No. It was specifically designed to blow those things to pieces, and to leave behind a radioactive wasteland for generations to come. I’d have protested too.

Of course, there were no protesters. The Blue Peacock program, like most other nuclear weapons programs, was known only to those with the highest security clearances. The project was classified from the 1950s all the way until 2004, when on April 1 the British National Archives declassified the Blue Peacock documents.

Yes, they declassified the program on April Fools’ Day.

No, apparently this wasn’t the British government’s idea of sophomoric shenanigans. When the BBC asked if the entire chicken-heated-nuclear-bomb thing was an elaborate prank, the National Archives replied, “The Civil Service does not do jokes.”

Quite.

AND THEN WHAT?

The end of Blue Peacock didn’t mean the end of the atomic demolition munition as a concept. In fact, the U.S. military is known to have produced at least six different variants of the ADM. Just not ones that needed livestock to keep them warm. The two longest-serving models, which were part of the American arsenal from the 1960s through the 1980s, were the Medium Atomic Demolition Munition (MADM), and the Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM). The MADM was the larger of the two—it weighed about 400 pounds (compare that to the 16,000-pound weight of the Blue Peacock). It had what was known as “dial-a-yield” or “variable yield” capabilities. This meant that you could change the power of the weapon on a range from 1 to 15 kilotons, giving the weapon system even more versatility.

The smaller and lighter SADM weighed only about 150 pounds total, including the comparatively feather-light warhead, which weighed only about 60 pounds. It was small enough that it could be carried by special operations teams on missions behind enemy lines. Special operators could even parachute into enemy territory and blow up targets such as command and control, communications, and logistical facilities. Since they weren’t intended to be deployed far ahead of time, the cold wasn’t really an issue, not to mention 1980s electronics were far more advanced and resistant to cold temperatures (despite that we still had to blow on Nintendo cartridges to make them work).

By the 1980s, at the height of Cold War tensions, there were more than six hundred total atomic demolition mines in the U.S. arsenal, a mixture of MADMs and SADMs. Nearly four hundred of these were staged in central Europe (West Germany and Italy), twenty-one in the Pacific at bases in South Korea and Guam, and the remainder (a little over two hundred) in the United States. There were also specifically trained soldiers in the U.S. military to maintain, operate, and, if the call went out, employ these weapons on the battlefield. The U.S. Army mustered about 750 ADM specialists in the 1980s, while the Navy and Marine Corps added another 200 or so. The U.S. government also made it a point to train engineers and special operators from allied nations in the use of American ADMs. Belgium, Britain, Greece, Italy, Turkey, West Germany, and the Dutch all sent soldiers to learn the ins and outs of the nuclear land mine.

Fortunately for everyone, atomic demolition munitions were never used in combat. By the end of the 1980s, with the collapse of communist governments throughout Eastern Europe, the United States decided to remove all ADMs from service.

It’s hard to overstate how dramatically America’s fortunes changed in the years immediately following the end of World War II. In 1945, the United States was on top of the world. We had vanquished our enemies to the trash heap of history. Our men (and women) were returning from the war as heroes, marching in ticker-tape parades, getting good jobs, going to school on the GI Bill, conceiving the baby boomer generation, and strutting into the postwar world as the planet’s sole nuclear-armed superpower.