#14: Blue Peacock and the Chicken-Heated Nuclear Mine
When British files on Blue Peacock became public around April 1, 2004, the timing caused an understandable problem: readers assumed the chicken part had to be an April Fool’s joke. The nuclear project itself was genuine. During the 1950s, Britain developed a concept for large nuclear land mines that could be positioned in West Germany and detonated if Soviet forces invaded from the east. The Army even ordered ten Blue Peacock devices in 1957 before the program was canceled the following year over strategic, political, and radioactive-fallout concerns. Cold European winters created one oddly domestic engineering problem. Electronics inside a buried weapon needed to remain warm enough to function, and among the proposed solutions was sealing live chickens inside the casing with enough food and water for several days.
