They Really Built This
Sep. 14th, 2020 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tbutlerFort Riley, KS is right off I-70 on the road out to Monument Rocks, so I decided to make a quick stop at 'Freedom Park'. Honestly not a whole lot there; a couple of old artillery pieces and an old armored personnel carrier, rusting out in the middle of an overgrown grassy field.
...huh, what's that one in the background?
Big one...
Yup, this is the Atomic Cannon - a Big Gun built in the early 50s to fire nuclear weapons in artillery shells. Uh-huh. Not the craziest Cold War idea, but certainly up there.
They actually test-fired one of them in Operation Upshot-Knothole Grable, and managed to avoid killing anyone. Yay.
...huh, what's that one in the background?
Big one...
Yup, this is the Atomic Cannon - a Big Gun built in the early 50s to fire nuclear weapons in artillery shells. Uh-huh. Not the craziest Cold War idea, but certainly up there.
They actually test-fired one of them in Operation Upshot-Knothole Grable, and managed to avoid killing anyone. Yay.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-15 01:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-15 01:17 am (UTC)They also had a slightly less crazy idea involving a more-or-less conventional nuclear reactor generating steam to run propellors. They used a B-36 as a test bed, though only to the stage of testing 'can we put an operational nuclear reactor in an airplane?' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_NB-36H All of the test flights required a chase plane filled with nuclear cleanup engineers, in case the plane crashed...
no subject
Date: 2020-09-15 11:59 am (UTC)