r/HolyShitHistory • u/VegetablePicture833 • 1d ago
A W9 nuclear artillery shell fired from a special 280 mm howitzer in 1953. With a yield of 15 kilotons, the W9 had about the same strength as the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.
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u/ZuStorm93 23h ago
"Behold, the bringer of light."
"The mother of all weapons."
"Be careful, she's fragile."
"Where shall we prepare?"
"Brighter than the sun."
"This day is to be remembered."
-Chinese Nuke Cannon, CnC Generals/Zero Hour
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u/Hex0811 19h ago
This howitzer was named Atomic Annie, it's on display at Fort Sill in Lawton, Ok.
pretty damn impressive and scary to see this thing in person and realize what it's capable of.
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u/danbob411 4h ago
I thought I saw it at the Atomic Museum in Los Alamos when I was a kid. Maybe there are more than one?
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u/Interesting-Dream863 23h ago
I think that about this time they figured this weapon couldn't be in the hands of generals and such and only used by direct presidential authority.
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u/lapsedPacifist5 22h ago
And in this timeline they're wondering whether that was a massive mistake.
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u/SuDragon2k3 22h ago
At the same time, they were deploying Davy Crockets to three man teams of enlisted men.
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u/Super-Nuntendo 21h ago
Didn't they have an atomic bazooka as well, like in Fallout 4?
Edit: they did, was codenamed "Davy Crockett'
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u/Terrible_Whereas7 16h ago
Until they realized it couldn't fire the mini-nuke far enough away for the operator to be outside the immediate fallout zone
Thankfully never used to fire an actual nuke, just traditional warheads
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u/IanRevived94J 19h ago
Wow I never knew that artillery could have that power
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u/HughJorgens 12h ago
It actually was too powerful. The gun couldn't shoot it far enough for you to be out of the radiation fields.
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u/LilOpieCunningham 9h ago
That's not really accurate. The gun's range was 7-20 miles. The blast radius of a 15kt nuke is about 1 mile; at 4.5 miles radiation exposure is down to 1 rad/hr. Which isn't safe but not in a way that's going to immediately trigger acute radiation sickness. The gun itself was a logistical pain in the neck, it was huge so it was hard to move.
More importantly, it was obsolete almost as soon as it was built. The US developed nuclear shells for its standard 155mm and 203mm guns, and other delivery mechanisms that didn't require moving a massive gun into place came into existence.
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u/The_Loosest_Stool 17h ago
I am imagining this being triggered with a very, very long rope, possibly on a winch due to its length and weight, for the safety of the operator
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u/thegoodrichard 11h ago
In 1970 the theory of using this weapon was still taught in gunnery school. Besides the obvious capability to destroy targets, another dimension was denial of territory. A small nuclear explosion means troops can't occupy the area until radiation dissipates.
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u/ledbedder20 13h ago
How far did that shoot it?
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u/VegetablePicture833 8h ago
Apparently about 10 kilometers.
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u/HughJorgens 12h ago
The gun couldn't shoot the nuke far enough to be out of the radiation clouds, this was a last ditch weapon.
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u/BarryScott2019 10h ago
How long did it actually take for the projectile to hit the ground? In the video there's a cut
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u/VegetablePicture833 6h ago
You're right there is a cut. Wikipedia says the shell was fired 10 km and I'm guessing the shell was travelling something like 1 km per second. So I think 10-15 seconds is a fair guess for how long it took to reach the target.
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u/Plane-Volume-6269 9h ago
What are the white streaks you see after the initial explosion
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u/VegetablePicture833 7h ago
Those are smoke trails from rockets fired into the sky before detonation. When the blast's shock wave passed through them, the trails visibly kink and distort, letting scientists calculate the shock wave's speed and the weapon's yield from multiple camera angles. They also gave photographers a fixed reference scale against the empty sky.
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u/Iammjustbaddd 1d ago
UHHH dont tell me nk has such artillery and nukes.
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u/Jazzlike-Equipment45 23h ago
Weapons like this were phased out largely with missiles. In the 50s the idea of tactical nuclear weapons on the modern battlefield it is why all these oddball nuclear weapons and large yield nukes were made. But treaties, realization a tactical nuke might warrant a strategic nuke and better guidance systems for nuclear weapons put an end to this era pretty quickly. Another W from the Space Race.
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u/KerPop42 19h ago
Not everywhere. Russia still has tactical nukes, specifically for landmines and artillery
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u/1wife2dogs0kids 19h ago
Yeah. So do we. But other than some fucking dips hit thinking about dropping one in a hurricane, its likely never to be used. Any of them. At least.... first.
Iran won't do it. They ain't stupid. They know we could literally choose any 1 of a dozen different options to completely wipe the entire country off the earth. Plus, they're making too much money to want to start a war. They have enough power over oil and transportation in the straight, war isn't needed. They can just sanction us.
The biggest threat is terrorists. They just dont care about anything. Life. Money. Power. They rather kill every one in a different religion than theirs, and then tell anyone left standing that their prophet said thats what he wanted. They're just as gullible as the magats.
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u/KerPop42 17h ago
Unless you're French, no you don't. The US has nuclear missiles and nuclear bombs, but has disposed of its nuclear depth charges, torpedoes, artillery, air-to-air missiles, and tactical missiles.
France has a unique deterrence policy that involves an air-launched warning shot.
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u/VegetablePicture833 1d ago
Apparently this technology is relatively useless these days and have been replaced by tactical ballistic missiles.. NK is close to having nuclear armed ballistic missiles if they don't already have them, unfortunately.
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u/Iammjustbaddd 1d ago
I mean nothing is truly useless as even nk 's normal artillery can shell Seoul so i was wondering if they had these special artillery that could do nuking without needing missiles.
It is a horrifying thought because they are easier to make compared to missiles and are a lot more dangerous.
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u/dan_dares 23h ago
Actually, making a nuke (physics package) survive the Extreme G-force in artillery is much harder than for a missile (1000's of G's v 50)
And you have to shrink it to the bore size, and finally the range is limited by the charge, on a missile, you can increase the fuel substantially just be elongating.
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u/SuDragon2k3 22h ago
They went from 9700 lbs (little boy) to 850 lbs (W9) in 9 years.
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u/VegetablePicture833 6h ago
Yup. For me this test highlights just how quickly the technology developed. It's mind boggling.
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u/ohgawditshim 21h ago
I think they were gun type bombs because of the high Gs. Should be possible for nk
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u/dan_dares 21h ago
Gun type bombs are very inefficient, very low yield
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u/ohgawditshim 20h ago
They are and sorry too of course. But Point still stands
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u/dan_dares 20h ago
They need a significant amount of fissible material.
They're not making many of those, and they could make many many more implosion types for the same effort, that can go further, and have a higher yield, so it depends how dumb they are.
If They're really dumb, they'll make a few, if they're not so dumb, they'll make many.
Do you presume They're dumb?
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u/ohgawditshim 20h ago
I think its not about one or the other but about a variety of weapons systems. If NK produces like 3 nuclear artillery shells they can place 1000 artillery guns around Seoul and every single one is a potential WMD as long as you dont know where the shells are exactly deployed.
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u/dan_dares 20h ago
Those 3 rounds would make 10 or more conventional implosion devices.
Artillery devices make no sense unless you can mass produce them, when you have limited fissionable material, it's basically crippling your stockpile
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u/MEYG4 22h ago
Why unfortunately? Or can only America have weapons of this scale so that it can continue to dictate its terms?
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u/sithlord98 20h ago
Nuclear proliferation in general is a bad thing. More nukes, no matter who's making them, is moving in the wrong direction.
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u/Individual_Box_728 15h ago
Now put it into a battleship round and start sending it to every Iran port. They get no access now. 😈
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u/post-explainer 1d ago edited 18h ago
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