Thread by @AtomicAnalyst

Sixty years ago today, the US conducted its 100th and last atmospheric nuclear test in Nevada: Little Feller I, the second operational test of the Davy Crockett recoilless rifle and its W54 warhead (yield = .018 kilotons). More than 1,000 troops took part in on-site exercises.

For the occasion, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and President Kennedy’s White House military representative, General Maxwell Taylor, were on hand to observe, sitting on wooden bleachers 2.17 miles southwest of ground zero.

Here is a declassified version of the US Army’s official film report about this nuclear test (and the preceding Little Feller II test on July 7, 1962):

Despite very serious concerns about its battlefield accuracy and its operational security risks in wartime, the Davy Crockett and 400 W54 warheads were deployed in Guam, Okinawa, South Korea, and West Germany from 1961-71.

Here is an interesting advertisement from the 1960s featuring an illustration of the jeep-mounted version of the Davy Crockett in action: “Some of the weapons illustrated on this page make an individual infantryman more powerfully armed than a bomber squadron of World War II ….”

At 51 pounds, the variable yield W54 (.01-1 kt) was the lightest and the lowest-yield implosion-type US A-bomb ever deployed. It also armed the GAR-26A Falcon air-to-air missile carried by F-102A interceptors (1961-72), and the Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM, 1964-88).

IMPORTANT FACT: Even at .018 kilotons (18 tons), the explosive yield of the Little Feller I test was almost twice as large as the 11-ton yield of the most powerful conventional bomb currently in the US arsenal: the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (aka “Mother of All Bombs”).

Read more about the Little Feller I nuclear test and the Davy Crockett here: nnss.gov/docs/fact_shee…

While this was the last atmospheric weapon test in Nevada, the last US atmospheric test in the Pacific Ocean was Tightrope, on November 4, 1962, when a Nike Hercules missile lofted a W31 warhead 69,000 feet above Johnston Island, where it exploded with a yield of 1-2 kilotons:

The last US nuclear test to deliberately interact with the atmosphere was Schooner on December 8, 1968, a Project Plowshare experiment in which a 30-kiloton device was detonated 355 feet beneath the Nevada Test Site to assess nuclear excavation techniques:

Lastly, here is a beautifully-restored, crystal-clear clip via @atomcentral from that official Army film showing Robert Kennedy and Maxwell Taylor, troops setting up the Davy Crockett and preparing for the blast, and the launch and detonation of the shell: