The world is again talking a lot about missiles, bombs and nuclear weapons. We could not pass by, and today's material will be devoted to a strange and eccentric, if I may say so about a deadly weapon, invention. The project appeared during the Cold War and was called (also rather strange) "Blue Peacock".
The project was developed at the British Royal Arms Research Institute in 1954. It was originally called Brown Bunny, then Blue Bunny, and finally Blue Peacock. "Peacock" was created "not only to destroy objects and structures over a large area, but also … to deny the capture of territory by the enemy for a significant time due to pollution."
The Blue Peacock was a nuclear land mine. It was designed to detonate with a time delay, several days after British forces had confirmation of a Soviet invasion of German soil. In the summer of 1957, the army ordered ten Blue Peacocks. It was planned to use them on the territory of Germany, and it is good that at the beginning of the 58th the order was canceled: the military department nevertheless decided that the risks associated with nuclear fallout and pollution of the Allied territory were too high.
Former Atomic Weapons Agency official David Hawkins in front of the Blue Peacock in the AWE Historical Collection.
The Blue Peacock design was based on the Blue Danube bomb (the first British nuclear bomb, the Blue Danube), but the peacock weighed 7257 kg. It consisted of two parts: a body and a warhead. The steel hull was so large that it had to be tested outdoors in a flooded gravel pit near Sevenoaks in Kent. Since the bomb will be left unattended, anti-burglar devices were provided in the design. There were also pressure and tilt sensors.
The first British nuclear bomb, the Blue Danube.
According to the scheme, it was possible to detonate a mine in three ways: if the break-in, tilt or pressure increase-decrease sensors were triggered, using a wire from a fuse installed five kilometers from the mine, or from an eight-day timer. Now comes the fun part.
Promotional video:
An intractable technical problem was that the mines placed underground, especially in winter, cooled too much. And the electronic components just didn't fire, freezing. Passive insulation didn't help much. And then an ingeniously strange proposal was born: to introduce mines of live chickens into the "mechanism". The chickens will be sealed inside the enclosure with a supply of food and water. They will stay alive for several days, and their body heat will be enough to keep all the components within operating temperature.