This is insane. There is no such thing as 'close range' survival in nuclear weaponry.

This was back in the day when no one knew the long term effects and immediacy of the radiation sickness that follows such an explosion. Jihadists might not care, but, the people they would seek to liberate would be destroyed by their own attempts at war. Just think now what the neighborhood wars of the USA will look like, with Balloon Boy technology on the loose and the inspiration of Palin. Everyone load up on potassium iodide.



The Davy Crockett (click title to entry - thank you) was one of the smallest nuclear weapons ever made by the United States. Built in the late 1950s, and designed for the battlefields of Europe to stop a possible Warsaw Pact invasion, the warhead looked like a watermelon, being only 30 inches long and weighing about 76 pounds. From a portable tripod launcher, it could be fired at the enemy as close as 1,000 feet or up to 13,000 feet away. It was a weapon for nuclear war at close range.
Today, the Davy Crockett system has long since been retired, and is now a neat museum piece. You can see a casing of the warhead at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque.
But the little nuclear watermelon is a reminder of the big work still to be done in arms control. The just-completed strategic weapons treaty that U.S. President Barack Obama will sign in Prague next week with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev does not cover smaller nuclear warheads in both arsenals that are a legacy of the Cold War -- the so-called battlefield, or tactical weapons....