The name Davy Crockett stands not only for an American war hero who fell at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836 – but also for one of the most bizarre developments of the Cold War: a portable tactical nuclear bomb.
Davy Crockett: The smallest nuclear weapon in history
In the 1950s, the US Army developed the Davy Crockett weapon system – a recoilless cannon that fired an M-388 nuclear warhead with an explosive force of 10 or 20 tons of TNT equivalent. The range: between two and four kilometers. The effects: localized but deadly.
The fireball would “only” have had a radius of around 20 meters if it had been deployed, but the potentially lethal radiation would have extended beyond 400 meters. Within this radius, around 15 percent of the survivors would have died of acute radiation sickness within a month. An explosion in New York’s Central Park would have destroyed and irradiated the entire width of the park, but the surrounding streets would have remained relatively unscathed.
Tsar bomb: When the inferno becomes an apocalypse
It would be a different story if the Soviet Tsar bomb – the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated – were used instead of Davy Crockett. Tested over Novaya Zemlya on October 30, 1961, it developed an explosive force of 50 megatons of TNT – almost 4,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The mushroom cloud shot 64 kilometers into the sky.
If this bomb were detonated in Central Park, practically all of New York would be wiped out. The pressure and heat wave would cause devastating damage as far away as Stamford, New Brunswick and Hampstead.
And transferred to Vienna? The pressure wave would not only devastate the city, but also the surrounding area – as far as Mistelbach, Neulengbach, Sopron and even Bratislava. A nuclear catastrophe of biblical proportions.
Simulate digitally – understand in real life
What such scenarios would mean for any city can be seen on the website nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap website. Various types of bomb can be projected onto any city – a tool that is as instructive as it is oppressive in a world in which the nuclear risk is growing again.
