THE BACKPACK NUKE
There is nothing unusual about paratroopers and special forces jumping with a full combat load or even with external loads. What the free-faller in the photo has between his legs is no ordinary load: a 23 kg nuclear warhead.
These weapons, called SADM (Special Atomic Demolition Munitions), were developed during the Cold War in the 1960s and could be carried by a single man. Their small size would have allowed relatively flexible and undetected use behind enemy lines, to destroy infrastructure such as ports, factories and power plants. Larger versions were meant to seal off sections of terrain along the inner German border and make it harder for the numerically superior Soviet forces to advance.
The W54 bomb shown in the photo had a yield of about 1 kt (Hiroshima bomb: about 15 kt) and was to be moved by a 2-man team. Members of the Green Berets were selected for it through a special testing process and grouped into so-called “Green Light Teams”. The first man would jump with the warhead or come ashore by water. The second man was there to help arm the bomb. Unlike most other nuclear warheads, an exception applied here: if one of the soldiers was lost, the W54 could also be detonated by a single soldier on his own. The so-called “Two-Man Rule” did not apply.
Once the timer was set, or the bomb was ready to be fired by wire, the soldiers were supposed to fall back. In reality the bomb could not have been buried deep enough, and the time or the distance would never have been enough to rule out danger to the team itself. In the early versions the firing wire was only 100 m long. On top of that, the Green Light Teams would have had to secure the bomb until it went off.
So the soldiers would have been inside the blast radius anyway and taken the full effect of the fallout. It was a suicide mission, and thank God it never had to be carried out for real. After heavy criticism, above all from Germany, the last 300 SADMs were withdrawn from Europe and disarmed in the 1980s.
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