10 Ridiculous War Weapons You Won't Believe Were Developed

2. Nuclear Mortars (USA, Cold War)

How to start a nuclear war and poison your own troops at the same time.

Remember that really cool bit in Starship Troopers where the Mobile Infantry lay waste to an Arachnid hive with a small rifle-mounted nuclear warhead? Well fortunately for everyone on the planet, we're way off coming up with anything as bed-wettingly terrifying as that but it didn't stop the USA having a shot at it during the Cold War. Ignoring the most positive aspect of a cold war (i.e. very few people end up getting killed when compared to a hot war), the Americans built the Davy Crocket: a recoilless mortar launcher with a 23kg nuclear warhead that had a blast yield equivalent to between 10 €“ 20 tonnes of TNT. And I'm sure that if Crocket had been alive at that time, he would have been pretty ticked off at his name being given to a weapon so inherently dangerous to everyone involved with it that when it was tested, it was remotely fired from over a mile away. This is because the Davy Crocket bled radiation like a haemophiliac bleeds... well, blood. Upon detonation, the radiation produced by the shells was fatal to a range of around a quarter of a mile and instantly lethal at about 500ft. Admittedly that's what you want from a small nuclear bomb but usually when you drop a nuke, you're both high above the blast zone and in a plane so you can get the hell out of there very very quickly. The Davy Crockett was designed to be used on the ground or mounted on a jeep for comparatively close quarter combat. Which meant that the three poor buggers who set off the thing (along with any other troops in their battalion) would have been in the danger zone and been hit by the radiation. Unless it's explicitly designed as a suicide weapon, one of the big no-no's of warfare is a weapon that can harm its users.