September 15, 2026 • 31 mins
Nowadays, pretty much everyone knows that nuclear weapons are incredibly dangerous -- but, not too long ago, military leaders saw these things as shiny new toys. Sure, they spent a lot of time trying to make bombs bigger. But they also spent a lot of time trying to make bombs smaller. They wanted something small enough for troops to physically carry into the battlefield, evading enemy lines and creating targeted explosions. In today's episode, Ben, Noel, and Max dive into the ridiculous history of 'backpack bombs' and learn how, along with their obvious drawbacks, these devices also had a terrifying habit of going missing.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Thank you, as always, so
much for tuning in. Let's hear it for the man,
the myth, the legend, Maxwell Newcar Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Bang, bang. Maxwell's silver new car.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Yes, yes.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
It's black, but okay.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Well, it's, you know, insert reference here. We'll fix an editing.
Shout out to Sylvia Rosemary. That is the one and
only returned from the grave, Noel Brown.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
And what a grave it's been, Ben. Been Ben.
Speaker 4 (00:59):
It's been a grave, grave, grave because I was gravely ill.
And y'all were kind enough to help me out and
let me rest up. And as you can still hear
in my voice, I'm sort of on the tail end
of a bit of a bout of plague. But I'm
happy to be back joined with you lovely fellows and
you lovely Ridiculous Historians out there in Ridiculous Historyland.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yes, yes. And as you can tell. I've got a
bit of a Batman voice as well, but I think
it suits us, Noel, because you and I are very
out-the-box dudes, as well as Max. They call me Ben Bullen.
This is Ridiculous History. We've been on a bit of
a nuclear weapons kick.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
You could say that as a people. As a civilization.
We do live in a society, it turns out. One
run by fear of nukes.
Speaker 5 (01:51):
Right.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Now, before you say, sirs, this is a Wendy's, we
want you to know that the entirety of the society
that you referenced, Noel, has been fascinated and terrified of
nuclear technology since World War II. And part of that
is because the same recipe and the same process you
(02:11):
use to make peaceful nuclear energy can make world-ending nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yeah, it's true. But what if we could like make
them real small? Right.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
Wouldn't that be a real game changer for this fear
and paranoia that you're describing?
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Dude, yes, because we know that right now, most people
on the planet are aware that nuclear weapons can be bad.
Only a few countries have nuclear weapons and they have
a bunch of kind of window dressing about how they're
going to Use them and never use them. But like
you were saying, in the years and decades right after
(02:51):
the invention of the atomic bomb, people were not so hesitant.
There were really powerful folks who were saying, we should
get weird with it. What else can we do with
this new dangerous toy?
Speaker 4 (03:10):
Ben, speaking of getting weird with it, it only just
recently kind of occurred to me that it is bizarre
that Oppenheimer was such a mega, mega, mega blockbuster. I
think it's just a Christopher Nolan effect. And I actually
didn't see the movie.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
I heard it was good.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
I heard there were parts of it that felt like
it glossed over some of the actual, you know, human
cost in favor of kind of like showing the I
don't know the pathos of the man himself, uh, Robert Oppenheimer,
but I haven't seen it. So I can't comment on
that directly, but I do think that the fact that
a movie about a scientist was the, one of the
(03:45):
biggest movies of all time.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Yeah. And it's worth a watch. Uh, if you would
like to, if you would like to check it out,
there's also a great graphic novel or pal, Matt Frederick
hipped me to a while back called Trinity. Check that
out as well. Uh, Folks, behind the scenes, pretty much
every government and cough-cough corporation, cough-cough, was trying to answer questions.
(04:09):
In the wake of the atomic age, they were saying,
what's the biggest bomb we can make? How long does
radiation last? How does fallout travel? How long will stuff
be contaminated? What happens when people who are exposed to
the consequences of a bomb have children? And so quickly,
after the bombings at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, People started asking
(04:31):
exactly what you teased, Noel. They said, not how big
can we make a bomb, how small can we make
a bomb?
Speaker 4 (04:38):
Speaking of Fallout, Ben, in the Fallout universe of video
games and now a pretty decent television series, the mini-nuke
is one of the most powerful deployable weapons that you
can get.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
And how big is the mini nuke?
Speaker 2 (04:56):
It is about the size and look of a propane tank.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
So to jump in here real quick, I just want
to reference Fort Hagen, which is a location you have
to go to if you do the Brotherhood of Steel
quest line in Fallout 4, where there's this facility and
on one floor, I forget what they're developing, but it's
super easy. And the other floor, they're trying to develop
a deployment technique for the mini nuke, which is basically
launched with a slingshot. And the problem is they just, uh,
(05:24):
most of the times, and this is a problem you'd
run into in the game, you end up blowing yourself up,
which is kind of the story of a nuke. You
might destroy things, but you yourself.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
And therein lies the quandary of how small can we
make it? Like, wow, it'd be dope if we could
have nuclear hand grenades, but she couldn't throw it physically
far enough that you yourself would not be in the
line of, you know, fire explosion.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Horrific, horrific fallout.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Yeah. And the fancy word for that is Pyrrhic victory.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
That's right. Foisted on your own petard.
Speaker 5 (05:57):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
You know, a petard is a grenade. I didn't.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
I learned that like last year because it's a term
my friend Frank and I use often when we are
playing Mario Kart and we hit ourselves with our own
green shell. We call that getting foisted on our own petard.
And we finally thought to look it up. And a
petard was a French term for one of those long
boy grenades that looks.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Kind of like a stick, you know, you throw. Yeah.
You blow yourself up with your own grenade. Yes.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yes. Again, a Pyrrhic victory. And at the, at this
point in history, The United States and the world overall
was not super concerned with the idea of Pyrrhic victories
or the philosophical quandaries thereof. Instead, they said, look, why
don't we take these big nukes, make something that can
fit in a briefcase? Ooh, what about a backpack?
Speaker 4 (06:44):
Ben, so you're saying let's just figure out the consequences later?
This attitude's been around a long time, you're saying?
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Very much so. It reminds me of a phrase you
used to say pretty often, Noel, which is, what was it,
move fast and break stuff?
Speaker 4 (06:59):
That's the Silicon Valley way that seems to have bled
its way into.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
You know, the everyday goings on of the U.S. government
as well. Yes, agreed.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
And they were asking, these boffins, they were asking some
of the questions that we've already asked. They said, okay,
how on earth could we miniaturize a nuclear weapon knowing
that it's expensive, the technology is really finicky? How can
we guarantee it works? How can we make it small
enough for a single human person to carry? And how
(07:32):
can we, to the big question here, how can we
make it safe enough for the people carrying it to
stay alive until it's time.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
To rock and roll? Right.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
And if this concept of making, you know, the world's
most dangerous weapon of mass destruction, little tiny cute guy,
That sounds a little bit how I learned to stop
worrying and love the bomb, strange love level crazy.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Well, it is. It's, again, one of these things where
it's like, well, why not? Why not do that thing?
What if the other guys are doing it? Yeah. Consequences
be damned. Because, I mean, the answer is you can't. Right. Exactly.
You just can't. This idea is foolish by its very nature.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
It's definitely... empiric again, because this we also have to remember, folks,
this reasoning is coming about during the Cold War. So
the Soviet bloc and the Western bloc, they're throwing all
kinds of crazy ideas out there. They're like, what if
we bake cats semi-robotic? What if we teach bats?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Cocaine's a hell of a drug, man.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Maybe it was. Maybe it was one of those meetings
for us. But we got to remember that stuff was
not sweet. for the U.S. and NATO early on in
the Cold War. Ignore what your history textbooks may have
told you.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
It was not a kumbaya off, to say the least.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Because at the close of World War II, the United
States is in a catbird seat because their industry hasn't
been demolished by the actions of the European theater. But
the West overall is still outmanned, outgunned. I'm not going
to do the Hamilton thing. In comparison to the Soviet bloc.
So what they were thinking, Uncle Sam and his boys
(09:25):
at this time, they were saying, yeah, the Soviets have
more people than us. And yeah, they have more machinery
of war, but we have the bomb. So we have
to let everybody know over the Iron Curtain that we're
totally fine with dropping the nukes. You know what I mean?
We are totally fine.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
It's, it's, it's not a bad tactic.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
It's a lot of talk, but we did do it once.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
So, I mean, who's to say, right? We're crazy.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
It's such, yeah, it's like crazy like a fox. It's,
There's a rabidity to it. And so it came to
pass from the 1940s through the 1980s, the U.S. and
the Soviet Union spent so much time and energy and
money and resources figuring out how to use nuclear weapons
(10:18):
because mad was not a thing at this point. Mutually
assured destruction. Everybody who was making decisions assumed that nuclear
weapons were a matter of when rather than a matter
of if. They were like, these bombs are happening. We
got to figure out the best.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Way to drop them.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
I mean, I personally find it kind of wild that
it's really only happened once or twice.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Three times a lady.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
I mean, just given the absolute division of international affairs
that have waxed and waned over the years since World
War II, I mean, I guess if there's ever going
to be a time that it might happen again, I mean,
knock on wood, for God's sake, it's now-ish. But I
am kind of, there is a slight sense of belief
in humanity that it hasn't happened again. And I'm not
(11:09):
even blaming the United States for doing what they did.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
It was, would you say it was necessary, Ben?
Speaker 1 (11:15):
The bombing of Japan?
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Was it the only choice? Was it really the only way?
Or do you think there were other ways?
Speaker 1 (11:23):
I believe there were other ways, fundamentally.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
And that act, though, the act of doing that is
what led to this whole ability to posture in this way, right?
Speaker 1 (11:36):
100%, yeah. I mean, this also, this posture, to use
your term there, this paints the U.S. into a dangerous corner.
you don't have much flexibility in how you respond to aggression.
So you're saying if communist forces launch a conventional non-nuclear attack,
then you as the West, you have to either purposefully
(12:00):
lose that conflict or you have to go full doomsday
and drop nuclear bombs again. And that would create a
back and forth exchange that's going to kill millions of people.
And You know, a big reason it's going to kill
millions of people is because Uncle Sam only had chunky
(12:20):
nuke boys. They didn't have a mini nuke. They had
just the stuff that would burn cities.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
This is a heavy topic, Ben.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
We haven't even really gotten into the meat and potatoes
of it yet.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
I guess we are just living in a time where
the specter of this– Especially when we're talking about Iran
and they cannot have a nuclear weapon and all of
that stuff. It just feels bigger than it has in
my lifetime.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
I mean, Iran's been two weeks away for years, right?
For decades. But the issue is now circumstances have changed
in the United States, right? That's probably where you're getting
that looming storm on the horizon feeling. Because previously, since
(13:11):
World War II, about up to now, the U.S. would
do everything in its power not to deploy a nuke.
And now things are a little bit squirrely, right? People
are feeling froggy. And you can only stay on a
lily pad so long before you hop. So they knew
way back in the Cold War, they knew that because
(13:33):
they were reliant on nuclear weapons— There was no way
not to escalate things. They would be entering a boxing match,
getting jabbed once, and then pulling out a gun and
shooting down not just their opponent, but everybody in the audience.
So they needed something a little more friendly, a little
less world-ending.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Okay, but is that kind of not quite how... I mean,
I guess there's megatons. So you could have like... Could
you have like a.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Could you have a mini-nuke?
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Could you have a little fart?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Just a little bit of a poof.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Just a little, just a little, just a piff instead.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Of a pfft. Yeah, maybe.
Speaker 4 (14:13):
I do wonder, because I guess, I mean, the nature
of a nuclear reaction and the subsequent explosion and fallout,
it just seems kind of like the nature of the technology. Like,
I'm not sure how you would, like, you know, kind
of trim it down.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Yeah, like, how do we build a gun that doesn't shoot?
The things that they dropped on Japan, Fat Man and
Little Boy, those are the big ones we're talking about,
strategic nuclear weapons. They're meant to be total war doctrine. Cities,
industrial centers, military bases, they're looking for something smaller, what
(14:50):
they call a tactical nuclear weapon. To your point, it
has lower explosive power. You can take infantry. You can
take on-the-ground troops and deploy it on the battlefield. And
I hate to say it because it sounds so soulless,
but really what they were thinking about is also how
(15:10):
much money they could save because you don't need aircraft.
You don't need heavy bombers. You know, they're expensive to operate.
It's easy to shoot them from the sky.
Speaker 4 (15:22):
Or, you know, really expensive tech like intercontinental ballistic missiles,
which is the method of carrying the nuclear payload.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
You don't have to waste those resources. You can move
the weapons in ways that are a lot more difficult
to detect. So from their perspective, Uncle Sam at this
point is saying, really, we're just making artillery. We're making
artillery plus super artillery, if you will. It'll be powerful
enough to change the course of a battle, but it
(15:54):
won't be destructive enough to plunge us back into another
world war. So they made porta nukes. It's a true story.
It's so ridiculous. They made backpack nukes.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Yes, indeed.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
These suitcase or backpack nukes had to, above all else,
be easy to move, as you've been kind of getting at, Ben.
Folks said about trying to make them less than 100
pounds max. In the United States, there were specially trained
troops known as green light troops who ran these specific
drills involving jumping out of low-flying planes in order to
(16:34):
practice carrying and handling these new weapons, deploying them safely
to the ground without blowing themselves up in the process.
I don't know why this just reminds me of like
this really tense moments in movies where you see people like,
I think it's Lost that I'm thinking of, like slowly
moving unstable dynamite because if.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
You drop it or something, it'll like. Don't shake it.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Don't shake it.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
It's unstable nitro. Exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
These Cold War soldiers were actually training, just like you said,
all the green light troops were carrying something called the
B-54 machine. Special Atomic Demolition Munition, or SATOM.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
SATOM. Cute.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
It was cute. It was also small. It was very kawaii.
It was small enough to fit inside a backpack, depending
on how you define backpack.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
I guess I'm picturing proton pack kind of vibes. There
we go. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
I mean, that's closer to it, dude, because this will
not fit in your average back-to-school backpack. It's like, well,
we have a quote with the dimensions.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
It's a good one.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
The B-54 stood 18 inches tall, encased in an aluminum
and fiberglass frame, rounded to a bullet shape on one end,
and had a 12-inch diameter control panel on the other.
According to an Army manual, the weapon's maximum explosive yield
was less than one kiloton. Okay, so the kiloton, Ben,
(18:04):
that's the... Terminology used to measure the explosive radius, I guess.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
The blast.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Got it. The explosion. Continuing. That is the equivalent of
a thousand tons of TNT. Yeah, just a thousand tons
of TNT. Between friends. Yeah. What's a thousand tons of
TNT between friends? Again, I'm still failing to see.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
How this is like a light kind of version you
know a thousand tons that's like sort of the difference
in a billion and a million you.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Know we were all very excited in the meeting right
really i'm telling you.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
You know what maybe they got a hold of some
of those nazi speed pills and that's where this.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Maybe that was it yeah because they also said hey
guys we're not going full crazy and We don't want
anybody to use the bomb unless they're authorized. So we're
going to have a little cover plate. It's going to
have a little combination lock.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Just stop it.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
And we're going to have a little glow in the
dark paint on the lock so that if you're out
in the field at night... You can unlock the bomb
at night.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
It's like your IndieGlo watch. This is too adorable.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
It's just the worst part about improv. You can't yes and.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
All the time.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
You should really maybe not on this one. Here's what
it looked like. Ben, you found the picture. It's got
its own little carrying case, little zipper thing. It looks
like a thermos or something, man. I mean, I get
it's hard to tell the scale. But could you help
me with the scale, Ben? I'm looking at it and
it does look like it's got a handle. I mean,
(19:36):
this would be Again, it's carryable. This is like a
very large carry-on bag.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, yeah. It's like a duffel bag with a conic
top to it. It's got some straps so you can
strap it to yourself. At the reverse on the flat side,
it has a long zipper that goes the circumference of
the package. I was remembering, Nolan, the research for this,
(20:01):
our conversation not too long ago where we talked about
how we get stopped at airports when we travel. Because
we have suspicious gear, our mics, our recording components, our
field gear. It's always a polite conversation, but can you
imagine taking this through the TSA?
Speaker 2 (20:21):
No, I can't, Ben.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
Well, maybe I can, and both of us can a
little bit, because a microphone in particular really does look
quite bomb-like. It is a metal encasement, you know, full
of little small electronic components and wires.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Yeah. And if you check out the pictures of these
various iterations of the backpack nuke, you can also see
what we described there, the duffel bag, that's the outer
cover for a parachuting kit, right? So if you open that,
you'll see another version that is a series of nested
(21:01):
canisters and we got to go to the third picture here.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
It's awesome this is where you get the scale you you.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Could see it uh you could see it anytime you
check for backpack nukes the green light troops had to
strap this to themselves they were already wearing parachutes and
other gear so they strapped it to their tank.
Speaker 4 (21:21):
It's strapped betwixt their their legs akimbo yeah They are
spread eagle flying down out of the clear blue sky
with a giant nuclear bomb strapped to their junk.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Oh, and Ben, the more I look at these pictures
and read some of these descriptions, the.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
More I mean, it's clear that the mini nuke in
Fallout was inspired by this.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Awesome. Yeah. No, you know what?
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Now you say it. I agree because these folks had to,
they were trained to parachute or scuba dive behind enemy
lines with their tiny boy nukes. And the idea was
you were going to blow up a military base or
a strategic installation or you're just going to make vast
swaths of land uninhabitable.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Yeah, scorched earth.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Scorched earth, right.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
Oh, and really quickly back to the mini-nuke and the
fallout thing. It is clearly meant to be satirical. It
is a largely– Pyrrhic weapon, to Max's point. You would
often blow yourself up when you use this thing. It's
very difficult to use effectively.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
And to jump in here, in Fallout 4, there's like,
I think there's only like one, there's only a few,
like many, the guns in Fallout you can upgrade in
many different ways. The Fat Man, which is the launcher
of the mini-nuke, has one where it launches a bunch
of mini-nukes and there's virtually no way to safely use
it without killing yourself instantly.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Yeah, again, Fallout gets it. Fallout understood the assignment. It's
good satire.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Yeah. We also know, going back to this idea of
Pyrrhic victory, there's a reason we're teasing this, because we
found video clips from training exercises. We found evidence from
our own government about contingency plans. And this was very much,
(23:08):
despite the fact that the U.S. had such strong propaganda
against suicide bombers like Kamikaze or Divine Wind, pilots in
World War II from Japan, they were pretty much planning
for the Greenlight Boys to die. They had these, you know,
fig leaf plans where they're like, here's how you escape
(23:29):
the scene before the bomb detonates. You have a timer, okay?
You have a mechanical timer. You can set it up
to 27 hours, which solves our fallout problem. But the
issue is the device is are relying on mechanical timers
for their detonators, and those are inherently unreliable. So they
(23:53):
could go off eight minutes early, they could go off
13 minutes late, you could still be in the blast radius.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
For sure. Do you think that the Greenlight troops understood
this risk, or was this something that was maybe sugar-coated
to them a little bit by Uncle Sam?
Speaker 1 (24:10):
I would like to think, Noel, that they were telling
the truth to the troops, as always. it was widely accepted,
no matter what the official stance was, that these endeavors
could turn into suicide missions. And there were even some
green light team instructors who would make it more suicidal.
They would say, look, if you're on my team, you
(24:31):
have to stay within visual range of that detonation to
make sure it goes off. So that means that if
you want to pull off a successful strike, your team
has to infiltrate enemy lines, sneak up on the enemy location,
carrying an untrustworthy nuclear weapon, then set it, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,
(24:51):
wait for it to explode, watch it explode, and then
somehow get back to friendly lands.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Well, it's almost an example of keeping up with the
Joneses that were the kamikaze pilots.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
I guess you're right, yeah. We also know Lest we
ridicule Uncle Sam too much, we know that Soviet powers– Yeah,
he can take it. He can take it.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
He's a big boy.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
We know that Soviet powers were working on the same thing.
This is weird. I love that you're mentioning keeping up
with the Joneses because this is also a golden age
of spying. Both the Soviets and the USA were riddled
with spies. They already always kind of knew a little
(25:41):
bit about what the other guy was up to. So
they kept freaking each other out, right? Like, these guys
are building a smaller bomb. Well, we're going to strap
one to our guys' butts.
Speaker 4 (25:53):
Yeah, I mean, again, even that attitude or that feeling
of paranoia continues very strongly to this day. Trump was
just asked in an interview if he was worried about
China spying on us and China supplying information to Iran
about locations and things like that or satellite imagery. And
Trump said, you know, I don't really care because we're
spying on them, too. You know, and it's just that
(26:14):
attitude has just been, you know, going strong since the
Cold War.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
I mean, also, at least we've got it more out
in the open.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
That's true. Right.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah. At least we have a president who said, yeah,
we're doing it, too.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
But yeah, there's not much I can give props to
Trump for. But I actually thought that was a rare
moment of something resembling interesting diplomacy.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Broken clocks.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Check them twice a day. But the thing is, for
the backpack nukes, the public on both sides of the
Cold War, they had no idea about this stuff. So
much so. that we don't know exactly how miniature they
were able to miniaturize things. We don't know what they
actually got up to. Is there something that's the size
(27:04):
of a 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola? Probably not, hopefully.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Probably not.
Speaker 4 (27:10):
I think there probably are physical limitations, the space that's
required to carry out a reaction of this magnitude, right?
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
But we do know there were troubling claims, like the
Soviet Union fell. In the aftermath, some of the world's
smartest experts are still asking what happened to all the
nukes that the USSR used to possess. There was an
interview we saw back in 1997 from a former Soviet
general named Alexander I.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Lebed.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
He was talking to 60 Minutes, you remember this, and
he said, The Soviet Union created around 250 suitcase-sized portable
nuclear weapons. And he said of those 250, about 100
of those bad boys are missing. We don't know where
they're at. Just like the airport says, don't touch unfamiliar baggage.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
That's a broken arrow, right?
Speaker 1 (28:07):
That is a broken arrow.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Who else is going to bring you?
Speaker 4 (28:09):
I mean, I'm just, if everyone's not familiar, that is
what the term for a missing nuke is, I believe.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Check out our two-part series on lost broken arrows.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yep. Yes, please do.
Speaker 4 (28:20):
Also, check out the pretty terrible 90s espionage film Broken
Arrow starring John Travolta. You didn't like it? The Travolta Zons.
I have not seen it since it was in the theaters, Ben.
I just have a feeling it's not going to hold up.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
But you know what, Ben?
Speaker 4 (28:36):
I am still kind of on the mend. So after
we podcast, I think I'm going to have a little
chill movie night. I think I'm going to watch Broken
Arrow and I'll report back.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
I'd love for you to report back. Also... Just to
manage expectations here, Noel, the reason that I enjoy Broken
Arrow is because I'm a fan of clowns. I support
the clown, you know, demographic.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Got it. Remember the General's Daughter?
Speaker 4 (28:59):
That was another one from that era, I believe, also
starring Travolta.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
And we have Max popping in. Max, what's on your mind?
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Just want to drop a reminder that there is a
Broken Arrow off the coast of Savannah, Georgia.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Savannah, Georgia.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
Not too far from us. So if that thing goes off-
it's been a pleasure knowing.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
You guys really has man really has good times yeah
it's been pretty great three out of five wow that's.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
Soft ben that's a soft review oh.
Speaker 5 (29:28):
Of course you guys are six out of five numbers
should even exist but the thing is with this idea
of these broken arrows it could be hogwash right it.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Could be the general is spitting propaganda for some reason
or maybe he wasn't read on to the top secret
locations of these things but just a few years after
that in 1999 the U.S. military research deep breath subcommittee
of the house armed services committee investigated the idea that
(30:00):
the Soviets at some point hid suitcase-sized nuclear weapons throughout
the United States. We haven't found any yet, none that
have been publicly confirmed. But, you know, our takeaway here
has to be don't pick up random suitcases. Just don't
do it.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
If you see something, say something.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Never leave your luggage unattended.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
And there we have it, folks. A moral, a bit
of ridiculous Cold War history and a big tip of
the cap to you for tuning in. Big, big thanks
to our super producer, Mr. Max Williams. Big thanks, of course.
To Noel Brown for recovery.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
I'm getting there, man. Dude, kick-ass work on this research brief.
Speaker 4 (30:47):
Ben, my friend and co-host and fellow Ridiculous Historian OG.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
And a huge thanks to Jonathan Strickland. The Quister, AJ Bahamas, Jacobs,
The Puzzler.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
And a big, big thanks as well as a tease
to our fellow rude dudes at Ridiculous Crime. If you
dig us, you'll love them.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Don't believe us?
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Check out next week's. Yeah. Stories, right?
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah, it's going to be a fun one. We'll tag
team back again. We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 4 (31:21):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Thank you, as always, so
much for tuning in. Let's hear it for the man,
the myth, the legend, Maxwell Newcar Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Bang, bang. Maxwell's silver new car.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Yes, yes.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
It's black, but okay.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Well, it's, you know, insert reference here. We'll fix an editing.
Shout out to Sylvia Rosemary. That is the one and
only returned from the grave, Noel Brown.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
And what a grave it's been, Ben. Been Ben.
Speaker 4 (00:59):
It's been a grave, grave, grave because I was gravely ill.
And y'all were kind enough to help me out and
let me rest up. And as you can still hear
in my voice, I'm sort of on the tail end
of a bit of a bout of plague. But I'm
happy to be back joined with you lovely fellows and
you lovely Ridiculous Historians out there in Ridiculous Historyland.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yes, yes. And as you can tell. I've got a
bit of a Batman voice as well, but I think
it suits us, Noel, because you and I are very
out-the-box dudes, as well as Max. They call me Ben Bullen.
This is Ridiculous History. We've been on a bit of
a nuclear weapons kick.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
You could say that as a people. As a civilization.
We do live in a society, it turns out. One
run by fear of nukes.
Speaker 5 (01:51):
Right.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Now, before you say, sirs, this is a Wendy's, we
want you to know that the entirety of the society
that you referenced, Noel, has been fascinated and terrified of
nuclear technology since World War II. And part of that
is because the same recipe and the same process you
(02:11):
use to make peaceful nuclear energy can make world-ending nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yeah, it's true. But what if we could like make
them real small? Right.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
Wouldn't that be a real game changer for this fear
and paranoia that you're describing?
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Dude, yes, because we know that right now, most people
on the planet are aware that nuclear weapons can be bad.
Only a few countries have nuclear weapons and they have
a bunch of kind of window dressing about how they're
going to Use them and never use them. But like
you were saying, in the years and decades right after
(02:51):
the invention of the atomic bomb, people were not so hesitant.
There were really powerful folks who were saying, we should
get weird with it. What else can we do with
this new dangerous toy?
Speaker 4 (03:10):
Ben, speaking of getting weird with it, it only just
recently kind of occurred to me that it is bizarre
that Oppenheimer was such a mega, mega, mega blockbuster. I
think it's just a Christopher Nolan effect. And I actually
didn't see the movie.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
I heard it was good.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
I heard there were parts of it that felt like
it glossed over some of the actual, you know, human
cost in favor of kind of like showing the I
don't know the pathos of the man himself, uh, Robert Oppenheimer,
but I haven't seen it. So I can't comment on
that directly, but I do think that the fact that
a movie about a scientist was the, one of the
(03:45):
biggest movies of all time.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Yeah. And it's worth a watch. Uh, if you would
like to, if you would like to check it out,
there's also a great graphic novel or pal, Matt Frederick
hipped me to a while back called Trinity. Check that
out as well. Uh, Folks, behind the scenes, pretty much
every government and cough-cough corporation, cough-cough, was trying to answer questions.
(04:09):
In the wake of the atomic age, they were saying,
what's the biggest bomb we can make? How long does
radiation last? How does fallout travel? How long will stuff
be contaminated? What happens when people who are exposed to
the consequences of a bomb have children? And so quickly,
after the bombings at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, People started asking
(04:31):
exactly what you teased, Noel. They said, not how big
can we make a bomb, how small can we make
a bomb?
Speaker 4 (04:38):
Speaking of Fallout, Ben, in the Fallout universe of video
games and now a pretty decent television series, the mini-nuke
is one of the most powerful deployable weapons that you
can get.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
And how big is the mini nuke?
Speaker 2 (04:56):
It is about the size and look of a propane tank.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
So to jump in here real quick, I just want
to reference Fort Hagen, which is a location you have
to go to if you do the Brotherhood of Steel
quest line in Fallout 4, where there's this facility and
on one floor, I forget what they're developing, but it's
super easy. And the other floor, they're trying to develop
a deployment technique for the mini nuke, which is basically
launched with a slingshot. And the problem is they just, uh,
(05:24):
most of the times, and this is a problem you'd
run into in the game, you end up blowing yourself up,
which is kind of the story of a nuke. You
might destroy things, but you yourself.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
And therein lies the quandary of how small can we
make it? Like, wow, it'd be dope if we could
have nuclear hand grenades, but she couldn't throw it physically
far enough that you yourself would not be in the
line of, you know, fire explosion.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Horrific, horrific fallout.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Yeah. And the fancy word for that is Pyrrhic victory.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
That's right. Foisted on your own petard.
Speaker 5 (05:57):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
You know, a petard is a grenade. I didn't.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
I learned that like last year because it's a term
my friend Frank and I use often when we are
playing Mario Kart and we hit ourselves with our own
green shell. We call that getting foisted on our own petard.
And we finally thought to look it up. And a
petard was a French term for one of those long
boy grenades that looks.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Kind of like a stick, you know, you throw. Yeah.
You blow yourself up with your own grenade. Yes.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yes. Again, a Pyrrhic victory. And at the, at this
point in history, The United States and the world overall
was not super concerned with the idea of Pyrrhic victories
or the philosophical quandaries thereof. Instead, they said, look, why
don't we take these big nukes, make something that can
fit in a briefcase? Ooh, what about a backpack?
Speaker 4 (06:44):
Ben, so you're saying let's just figure out the consequences later?
This attitude's been around a long time, you're saying?
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Very much so. It reminds me of a phrase you
used to say pretty often, Noel, which is, what was it,
move fast and break stuff?
Speaker 4 (06:59):
That's the Silicon Valley way that seems to have bled
its way into.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
You know, the everyday goings on of the U.S. government
as well. Yes, agreed.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
And they were asking, these boffins, they were asking some
of the questions that we've already asked. They said, okay,
how on earth could we miniaturize a nuclear weapon knowing
that it's expensive, the technology is really finicky? How can
we guarantee it works? How can we make it small
enough for a single human person to carry? And how
(07:32):
can we, to the big question here, how can we
make it safe enough for the people carrying it to
stay alive until it's time.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
To rock and roll? Right.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
And if this concept of making, you know, the world's
most dangerous weapon of mass destruction, little tiny cute guy,
That sounds a little bit how I learned to stop
worrying and love the bomb, strange love level crazy.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Well, it is. It's, again, one of these things where
it's like, well, why not? Why not do that thing?
What if the other guys are doing it? Yeah. Consequences
be damned. Because, I mean, the answer is you can't. Right. Exactly.
You just can't. This idea is foolish by its very nature.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
It's definitely... empiric again, because this we also have to remember, folks,
this reasoning is coming about during the Cold War. So
the Soviet bloc and the Western bloc, they're throwing all
kinds of crazy ideas out there. They're like, what if
we bake cats semi-robotic? What if we teach bats?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Cocaine's a hell of a drug, man.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Maybe it was. Maybe it was one of those meetings
for us. But we got to remember that stuff was
not sweet. for the U.S. and NATO early on in
the Cold War. Ignore what your history textbooks may have
told you.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
It was not a kumbaya off, to say the least.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Because at the close of World War II, the United
States is in a catbird seat because their industry hasn't
been demolished by the actions of the European theater. But
the West overall is still outmanned, outgunned. I'm not going
to do the Hamilton thing. In comparison to the Soviet bloc.
So what they were thinking, Uncle Sam and his boys
(09:25):
at this time, they were saying, yeah, the Soviets have
more people than us. And yeah, they have more machinery
of war, but we have the bomb. So we have
to let everybody know over the Iron Curtain that we're
totally fine with dropping the nukes. You know what I mean?
We are totally fine.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
It's, it's, it's not a bad tactic.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
It's a lot of talk, but we did do it once.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
So, I mean, who's to say, right? We're crazy.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
It's such, yeah, it's like crazy like a fox. It's,
There's a rabidity to it. And so it came to
pass from the 1940s through the 1980s, the U.S. and
the Soviet Union spent so much time and energy and
money and resources figuring out how to use nuclear weapons
(10:18):
because mad was not a thing at this point. Mutually
assured destruction. Everybody who was making decisions assumed that nuclear
weapons were a matter of when rather than a matter
of if. They were like, these bombs are happening. We
got to figure out the best.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Way to drop them.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
I mean, I personally find it kind of wild that
it's really only happened once or twice.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Three times a lady.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
I mean, just given the absolute division of international affairs
that have waxed and waned over the years since World
War II, I mean, I guess if there's ever going
to be a time that it might happen again, I mean,
knock on wood, for God's sake, it's now-ish. But I
am kind of, there is a slight sense of belief
in humanity that it hasn't happened again. And I'm not
(11:09):
even blaming the United States for doing what they did.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
It was, would you say it was necessary, Ben?
Speaker 1 (11:15):
The bombing of Japan?
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Was it the only choice? Was it really the only way?
Or do you think there were other ways?
Speaker 1 (11:23):
I believe there were other ways, fundamentally.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
And that act, though, the act of doing that is
what led to this whole ability to posture in this way, right?
Speaker 1 (11:36):
100%, yeah. I mean, this also, this posture, to use
your term there, this paints the U.S. into a dangerous corner.
you don't have much flexibility in how you respond to aggression.
So you're saying if communist forces launch a conventional non-nuclear attack,
then you as the West, you have to either purposefully
(12:00):
lose that conflict or you have to go full doomsday
and drop nuclear bombs again. And that would create a
back and forth exchange that's going to kill millions of people.
And You know, a big reason it's going to kill
millions of people is because Uncle Sam only had chunky
(12:20):
nuke boys. They didn't have a mini nuke. They had
just the stuff that would burn cities.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
This is a heavy topic, Ben.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
We haven't even really gotten into the meat and potatoes
of it yet.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
I guess we are just living in a time where
the specter of this– Especially when we're talking about Iran
and they cannot have a nuclear weapon and all of
that stuff. It just feels bigger than it has in
my lifetime.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
I mean, Iran's been two weeks away for years, right?
For decades. But the issue is now circumstances have changed
in the United States, right? That's probably where you're getting
that looming storm on the horizon feeling. Because previously, since
(13:11):
World War II, about up to now, the U.S. would
do everything in its power not to deploy a nuke.
And now things are a little bit squirrely, right? People
are feeling froggy. And you can only stay on a
lily pad so long before you hop. So they knew
way back in the Cold War, they knew that because
(13:33):
they were reliant on nuclear weapons— There was no way
not to escalate things. They would be entering a boxing match,
getting jabbed once, and then pulling out a gun and
shooting down not just their opponent, but everybody in the audience.
So they needed something a little more friendly, a little
less world-ending.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Okay, but is that kind of not quite how... I mean,
I guess there's megatons. So you could have like... Could
you have like a.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Could you have a mini-nuke?
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Could you have a little fart?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Just a little bit of a poof.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Just a little, just a little, just a piff instead.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Of a pfft. Yeah, maybe.
Speaker 4 (14:13):
I do wonder, because I guess, I mean, the nature
of a nuclear reaction and the subsequent explosion and fallout,
it just seems kind of like the nature of the technology. Like,
I'm not sure how you would, like, you know, kind
of trim it down.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Yeah, like, how do we build a gun that doesn't shoot?
The things that they dropped on Japan, Fat Man and
Little Boy, those are the big ones we're talking about,
strategic nuclear weapons. They're meant to be total war doctrine. Cities,
industrial centers, military bases, they're looking for something smaller, what
(14:50):
they call a tactical nuclear weapon. To your point, it
has lower explosive power. You can take infantry. You can
take on-the-ground troops and deploy it on the battlefield. And
I hate to say it because it sounds so soulless,
but really what they were thinking about is also how
(15:10):
much money they could save because you don't need aircraft.
You don't need heavy bombers. You know, they're expensive to operate.
It's easy to shoot them from the sky.
Speaker 4 (15:22):
Or, you know, really expensive tech like intercontinental ballistic missiles,
which is the method of carrying the nuclear payload.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
You don't have to waste those resources. You can move
the weapons in ways that are a lot more difficult
to detect. So from their perspective, Uncle Sam at this
point is saying, really, we're just making artillery. We're making
artillery plus super artillery, if you will. It'll be powerful
enough to change the course of a battle, but it
(15:54):
won't be destructive enough to plunge us back into another
world war. So they made porta nukes. It's a true story.
It's so ridiculous. They made backpack nukes.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Yes, indeed.
Speaker 4 (16:12):
These suitcase or backpack nukes had to, above all else,
be easy to move, as you've been kind of getting at, Ben.
Folks said about trying to make them less than 100
pounds max. In the United States, there were specially trained
troops known as green light troops who ran these specific
drills involving jumping out of low-flying planes in order to
(16:34):
practice carrying and handling these new weapons, deploying them safely
to the ground without blowing themselves up in the process.
I don't know why this just reminds me of like
this really tense moments in movies where you see people like,
I think it's Lost that I'm thinking of, like slowly
moving unstable dynamite because if.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
You drop it or something, it'll like. Don't shake it.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Don't shake it.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
It's unstable nitro. Exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
These Cold War soldiers were actually training, just like you said,
all the green light troops were carrying something called the
B-54 machine. Special Atomic Demolition Munition, or SATOM.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
SATOM. Cute.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
It was cute. It was also small. It was very kawaii.
It was small enough to fit inside a backpack, depending
on how you define backpack.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
I guess I'm picturing proton pack kind of vibes. There
we go. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
I mean, that's closer to it, dude, because this will
not fit in your average back-to-school backpack. It's like, well,
we have a quote with the dimensions.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
It's a good one.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
The B-54 stood 18 inches tall, encased in an aluminum
and fiberglass frame, rounded to a bullet shape on one end,
and had a 12-inch diameter control panel on the other.
According to an Army manual, the weapon's maximum explosive yield
was less than one kiloton. Okay, so the kiloton, Ben,
(18:04):
that's the... Terminology used to measure the explosive radius, I guess.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
The blast.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Got it. The explosion. Continuing. That is the equivalent of
a thousand tons of TNT. Yeah, just a thousand tons
of TNT. Between friends. Yeah. What's a thousand tons of
TNT between friends? Again, I'm still failing to see.
Speaker 4 (18:27):
How this is like a light kind of version you
know a thousand tons that's like sort of the difference
in a billion and a million you.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Know we were all very excited in the meeting right
really i'm telling you.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
You know what maybe they got a hold of some
of those nazi speed pills and that's where this.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Maybe that was it yeah because they also said hey
guys we're not going full crazy and We don't want
anybody to use the bomb unless they're authorized. So we're
going to have a little cover plate. It's going to
have a little combination lock.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Just stop it.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
And we're going to have a little glow in the
dark paint on the lock so that if you're out
in the field at night... You can unlock the bomb
at night.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
It's like your IndieGlo watch. This is too adorable.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
It's just the worst part about improv. You can't yes and.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
All the time.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
You should really maybe not on this one. Here's what
it looked like. Ben, you found the picture. It's got
its own little carrying case, little zipper thing. It looks
like a thermos or something, man. I mean, I get
it's hard to tell the scale. But could you help
me with the scale, Ben? I'm looking at it and
it does look like it's got a handle. I mean,
(19:36):
this would be Again, it's carryable. This is like a
very large carry-on bag.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, yeah. It's like a duffel bag with a conic
top to it. It's got some straps so you can
strap it to yourself. At the reverse on the flat side,
it has a long zipper that goes the circumference of
the package. I was remembering, Nolan, the research for this,
(20:01):
our conversation not too long ago where we talked about
how we get stopped at airports when we travel. Because
we have suspicious gear, our mics, our recording components, our
field gear. It's always a polite conversation, but can you
imagine taking this through the TSA?
Speaker 2 (20:21):
No, I can't, Ben.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
Well, maybe I can, and both of us can a
little bit, because a microphone in particular really does look
quite bomb-like. It is a metal encasement, you know, full
of little small electronic components and wires.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
Yeah. And if you check out the pictures of these
various iterations of the backpack nuke, you can also see
what we described there, the duffel bag, that's the outer
cover for a parachuting kit, right? So if you open that,
you'll see another version that is a series of nested
(21:01):
canisters and we got to go to the third picture here.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
It's awesome this is where you get the scale you you.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Could see it uh you could see it anytime you
check for backpack nukes the green light troops had to
strap this to themselves they were already wearing parachutes and
other gear so they strapped it to their tank.
Speaker 4 (21:21):
It's strapped betwixt their their legs akimbo yeah They are
spread eagle flying down out of the clear blue sky
with a giant nuclear bomb strapped to their junk.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Oh, and Ben, the more I look at these pictures
and read some of these descriptions, the.
Speaker 4 (21:37):
More I mean, it's clear that the mini nuke in
Fallout was inspired by this.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Awesome. Yeah. No, you know what?
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Now you say it. I agree because these folks had to,
they were trained to parachute or scuba dive behind enemy
lines with their tiny boy nukes. And the idea was
you were going to blow up a military base or
a strategic installation or you're just going to make vast
swaths of land uninhabitable.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Yeah, scorched earth.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Scorched earth, right.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
Oh, and really quickly back to the mini-nuke and the
fallout thing. It is clearly meant to be satirical. It
is a largely– Pyrrhic weapon, to Max's point. You would
often blow yourself up when you use this thing. It's
very difficult to use effectively.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
And to jump in here, in Fallout 4, there's like,
I think there's only like one, there's only a few,
like many, the guns in Fallout you can upgrade in
many different ways. The Fat Man, which is the launcher
of the mini-nuke, has one where it launches a bunch
of mini-nukes and there's virtually no way to safely use
it without killing yourself instantly.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Yeah, again, Fallout gets it. Fallout understood the assignment. It's
good satire.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Yeah. We also know, going back to this idea of
Pyrrhic victory, there's a reason we're teasing this, because we
found video clips from training exercises. We found evidence from
our own government about contingency plans. And this was very much,
(23:08):
despite the fact that the U.S. had such strong propaganda
against suicide bombers like Kamikaze or Divine Wind, pilots in
World War II from Japan, they were pretty much planning
for the Greenlight Boys to die. They had these, you know,
fig leaf plans where they're like, here's how you escape
(23:29):
the scene before the bomb detonates. You have a timer, okay?
You have a mechanical timer. You can set it up
to 27 hours, which solves our fallout problem. But the
issue is the device is are relying on mechanical timers
for their detonators, and those are inherently unreliable. So they
(23:53):
could go off eight minutes early, they could go off
13 minutes late, you could still be in the blast radius.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
For sure. Do you think that the Greenlight troops understood
this risk, or was this something that was maybe sugar-coated
to them a little bit by Uncle Sam?
Speaker 1 (24:10):
I would like to think, Noel, that they were telling
the truth to the troops, as always. it was widely accepted,
no matter what the official stance was, that these endeavors
could turn into suicide missions. And there were even some
green light team instructors who would make it more suicidal.
They would say, look, if you're on my team, you
(24:31):
have to stay within visual range of that detonation to
make sure it goes off. So that means that if
you want to pull off a successful strike, your team
has to infiltrate enemy lines, sneak up on the enemy location,
carrying an untrustworthy nuclear weapon, then set it, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,
(24:51):
wait for it to explode, watch it explode, and then
somehow get back to friendly lands.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Well, it's almost an example of keeping up with the
Joneses that were the kamikaze pilots.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
I guess you're right, yeah. We also know Lest we
ridicule Uncle Sam too much, we know that Soviet powers– Yeah,
he can take it. He can take it.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
He's a big boy.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
We know that Soviet powers were working on the same thing.
This is weird. I love that you're mentioning keeping up
with the Joneses because this is also a golden age
of spying. Both the Soviets and the USA were riddled
with spies. They already always kind of knew a little
(25:41):
bit about what the other guy was up to. So
they kept freaking each other out, right? Like, these guys
are building a smaller bomb. Well, we're going to strap
one to our guys' butts.
Speaker 4 (25:53):
Yeah, I mean, again, even that attitude or that feeling
of paranoia continues very strongly to this day. Trump was
just asked in an interview if he was worried about
China spying on us and China supplying information to Iran
about locations and things like that or satellite imagery. And
Trump said, you know, I don't really care because we're
spying on them, too. You know, and it's just that
(26:14):
attitude has just been, you know, going strong since the
Cold War.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
I mean, also, at least we've got it more out
in the open.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
That's true. Right.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
Yeah. At least we have a president who said, yeah,
we're doing it, too.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
But yeah, there's not much I can give props to
Trump for. But I actually thought that was a rare
moment of something resembling interesting diplomacy.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Broken clocks.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Check them twice a day. But the thing is, for
the backpack nukes, the public on both sides of the
Cold War, they had no idea about this stuff. So
much so. that we don't know exactly how miniature they
were able to miniaturize things. We don't know what they
actually got up to. Is there something that's the size
(27:04):
of a 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola? Probably not, hopefully.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Probably not.
Speaker 4 (27:10):
I think there probably are physical limitations, the space that's
required to carry out a reaction of this magnitude, right?
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
But we do know there were troubling claims, like the
Soviet Union fell. In the aftermath, some of the world's
smartest experts are still asking what happened to all the
nukes that the USSR used to possess. There was an
interview we saw back in 1997 from a former Soviet
general named Alexander I.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Lebed.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
He was talking to 60 Minutes, you remember this, and
he said, The Soviet Union created around 250 suitcase-sized portable
nuclear weapons. And he said of those 250, about 100
of those bad boys are missing. We don't know where
they're at. Just like the airport says, don't touch unfamiliar baggage.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
That's a broken arrow, right?
Speaker 1 (28:07):
That is a broken arrow.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Who else is going to bring you?
Speaker 4 (28:09):
I mean, I'm just, if everyone's not familiar, that is
what the term for a missing nuke is, I believe.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Check out our two-part series on lost broken arrows.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yep. Yes, please do.
Speaker 4 (28:20):
Also, check out the pretty terrible 90s espionage film Broken
Arrow starring John Travolta. You didn't like it? The Travolta Zons.
I have not seen it since it was in the theaters, Ben.
I just have a feeling it's not going to hold up.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
But you know what, Ben?
Speaker 4 (28:36):
I am still kind of on the mend. So after
we podcast, I think I'm going to have a little
chill movie night. I think I'm going to watch Broken
Arrow and I'll report back.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
I'd love for you to report back. Also... Just to
manage expectations here, Noel, the reason that I enjoy Broken
Arrow is because I'm a fan of clowns. I support
the clown, you know, demographic.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Got it. Remember the General's Daughter?
Speaker 4 (28:59):
That was another one from that era, I believe, also
starring Travolta.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
And we have Max popping in. Max, what's on your mind?
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Just want to drop a reminder that there is a
Broken Arrow off the coast of Savannah, Georgia.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Savannah, Georgia.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
Not too far from us. So if that thing goes off-
it's been a pleasure knowing.
Speaker 4 (29:17):
You guys really has man really has good times yeah
it's been pretty great three out of five wow that's.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
Soft ben that's a soft review oh.
Speaker 5 (29:28):
Of course you guys are six out of five numbers
should even exist but the thing is with this idea
of these broken arrows it could be hogwash right it.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Could be the general is spitting propaganda for some reason
or maybe he wasn't read on to the top secret
locations of these things but just a few years after
that in 1999 the U.S. military research deep breath subcommittee
of the house armed services committee investigated the idea that
(30:00):
the Soviets at some point hid suitcase-sized nuclear weapons throughout
the United States. We haven't found any yet, none that
have been publicly confirmed. But, you know, our takeaway here
has to be don't pick up random suitcases. Just don't
do it.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
If you see something, say something.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Never leave your luggage unattended.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
And there we have it, folks. A moral, a bit
of ridiculous Cold War history and a big tip of
the cap to you for tuning in. Big, big thanks
to our super producer, Mr. Max Williams. Big thanks, of course.
To Noel Brown for recovery.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
I'm getting there, man. Dude, kick-ass work on this research brief.
Speaker 4 (30:47):
Ben, my friend and co-host and fellow Ridiculous Historian OG.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
And a huge thanks to Jonathan Strickland. The Quister, AJ Bahamas, Jacobs,
The Puzzler.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
And a big, big thanks as well as a tease
to our fellow rude dudes at Ridiculous Crime. If you
dig us, you'll love them.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Don't believe us?
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Check out next week's. Yeah. Stories, right?
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah, it's going to be a fun one. We'll tag
team back again. We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 4 (31:21):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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