"Howard Berkowitz" wrote in message
...
In article , "Kevin Brooks"
wrote:

"Owe Jessen" wrote in message
...
Am Fri, 27 Feb 2004 03:15:43 GMT, schrieb Fred J. McCall
:

Owe Jessen wrote:

:Could you give in some applications for the SADM? ISTR from
childhood
80s) that there were plans to destroy a lot of bridges and so on
:with
:atomic bombs. Why was it thought necessary to use those instead of
:conventional explosives? Aside from the fact that using nuclear
:weopons just for the fun in a friendly country might not be overly
opular there.

Because wiring a modern bridge with sufficient explosives to bring it
down is not a quick job. Failure to manage this cost the Germans
dearly in WWII.

Either we wire them up and leave them that way in peacetime (not real
safe) or you take them down fast with nukes in wartime.

I guess the folks living next to the bridges were thrilled. Or was the
plan to use it only, if nuclear weapons were allready being used?

Bridges were not a very common target for SADM.

I have to admit I was using "bridge" as shorthand for "transportation
bottleneck," as it hadn't been used precisely in every case. Yes, I
agree that the most probable defensive use of ADMs would be road cuts,
where you aren't just destroying structural integrity of a bridge, but
needing to cause the collapse of hundreds to thousands of tons of rock.

They still might have made sense for a "friendly" bridge that had not
been prechambered, or for special operations against bridges in the
enemy rear.

No code for the PAL, and the weapon would
crunch
itself so that it would not be usable.

IIRC, the ADMs had fairly simple PALs -- essentially combination locks
that could not reasonably be bypassed in the field. These were
significantly different from the later, limited retry, multiple code
option PALs, which would also destroy key components of the devices.

It has been quite a few years since I sat through the very basic lectures we
received on the SADM (being in the very last EOBC class to go through that
phase), but IIRC the PAL was set up such that failure to input the proper
code would result in the device inerting itself. Or at least that was what
we were told as we viewed the training device from our stadium seating
arrangement. It was not that big a deal for us--our job was to be able to
run the calcualtions for emplacement requirements (i.e., determine the depth
of placment required to acheive the required effect)--the ADM guys, who had
to attend a special ADM course (which was three to five weeks long, IIRC),
would have been the guys doing the arming. We were supposed to be able to
help arm it and if necessary provide the demolition guard (minus the
requirement for actually firing the device).

Brooks