Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 27, 1994 TAG: 9407280069
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The so-called ``Green Light'' Army demolition squads were supposed to deliver, arm and then ``watch the device until it went off'' to assure that enemy forces did not interfere with the explosion, said a former Special Forces member trained in the mission.
``If that meant staying inside the hydroelectric plant, standing 20 feet away from the warhead, that's where you stayed,'' he said. ``It was suicide and we all knew it.''
Retired Army Maj. Gen. David Einsel, deputy assistant secretary of defense for atomic energy from 1980 to 1985, confirmed the ``Green Light'' teams' assignment. Man-portable nuclear warheads ``were not the weapon of choice, and it had to be a very worthwhile mission or you weren't going to set it off in the first place,'' Einsel added.
George Grimes, spokesman for the U.S. Special Operations Command, said he could not discuss the capabilities of forces assigned to the command. The Special Forces member trained in nuclear detonation asked not to be identified because he said he had signed confidentiality agreements while in the Army program.
A classified Army manual on nuclear demolition supports his account and Einsel's, and civilian experts in nuclear weapons say it is consistent with their understanding of nuclear war tactics.
No devices ever actually were fired by the Army's tactical nuclear demolition teams. The last of 300 so-called ``backpack nukes'' built for such missions were withdrawn from NATO arsenals in 1988 and destroyed.
President Eisenhower conceived of the highly classified U.S. tactical weapons program in the 1950s, hoping that ways could be found to use very small nuclear devices in combat.
As it turned out, ``tactics that made sense in the '50s when the weapons were conceived and were plausible in the '60s when they were deployed, were absolutely comical by the '80s,'' said William Arkin, an expert on nuclear warfare and columnist and contributing editor for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
The smallest weapon, armed with a 58-pound warhead and producing a blast equal to only a few tons of TNT, was deployed in Europe in 1964. It was designed to destroy Eastern Bloc bridges, tunnels, dams, canals and other targets invulnerable to bombardment from the air.
The warhead was drum-shaped, about 20 inches in diameter and 24 inches tall. Two-man teams carried the devices in customized backpacks. One bore the warhead, which was nicknamed ``the monkey,'' according to the former Army Special Forces commando; the other carried the firing mechanism. Assembled, the device weighed about 160 pounds, according to the Nuclear Weapons Databook, the definitive unclassified manual on the subject.
``They practiced delivering it by land, sea and air; by static line, free fall, HALO [high-altitude, low-opening parachute] jump and submarine; by car, truck, train and just plain hiking it in,'' the former commando said .
``It looked like nothing. They'd disguise it as a trash can, a water cooler, a keg of beer. If somebody beside it pulled out a sextant, you'd think it was surveying gear.''
by CNB