10 Ridiculous War Weapons You Won't Believe Were Developed

1. Chicken Warmed Nuclear Landmines (UK, Cold War)

Somewhere out there, there's a team of mutant chickens preparing to get revenge.

I promise that even though it's nearly New Year, I haven't been drinking. Chicken warmed nuclear landmines were genuinely considered as a viable military weapon by Britain in 1958. The idea (which thankfully was never put into operation) was to build seven tonne nuclear landmines (that's a 10 kiloton yield by the way) and bury them under the North German Plain (Because, you know, b******s to Germany) in case the Russians invaded from the east. Apparently, turning half of Western Europe into Fallout 3 was a perfectly measured response to a land-based invasion but you're probably struggling to work out why this plan to blow up half of Germany in case of a Russian invasion needed chickens. Well there was method (a really awful one) to the madness. Blue Peacock (the first mine) was developed in the winter. And burying something with a sensitive electronic mechanism in the freezing cold earth (especially a nuclear bomb) is a risky strategy since the cold could interfere with the electronics and potentially cause it to go off prematurely or not at all. Any sane person would look into methods of artificially keeping the landmine warm like some kind of battery powered heater. Instead, the engineers we trust with creating weapons used to defend the country decided to use chickens. A live chicken would be sealed in the bomb casing with enough food and water to last about a week so that it would keep the bomb warm and the trigger mechanism intact until it was triggered. What is it with weaponsmiths and killing animals? Don't they get enough of that in the testing stages of conventional weapons? From a technical standpoint, this was nuttier than squirrel diarrhoea (it was assumed to be an April Fool's joke when the information was declassified) but the political and military reasoning were even worse. If these were normal landmines, burying them under Germany would have been a risky move but a necessary evil in the long run that would only cause very minor collateral damage. But that little word "nuclear" changes everything. As well as Blue Peacock and the other mines having such a huge yield that they had the potential to turn Germany and the surrounding area into a scorched wasteland, the Allied commanders specifically wanted to "deny occupation of the area to an enemy for an appreciable time due to contamination". So basically, the plans for repelling a Russian invasion boiled down to "If we can't have it, no one can" with seven tonne landmines. That's like napalming your garden to keep the neighbour's dog out. Which probably would have been the next ace up Britain's sleeve if the chicken warmed landmines had fallen through. Which military weapons do you think were ridiculous? Let us know in the comments section below...