Machines
1233 MORE
WEAPONS THAT
NEVER MADE IT
SLAM isn’t the only
weapons system the
military ultimately
scrapped.1 / FLYING
P L A T F O R M S
(1950S)
A soldier could fire
from the air while on
the VZ-1 Pawnee, a
flying platform kept
aloft by two rotors in
a duct, and move the
craft by shifting his
weight. It was too slow
and small for combat.2 / TAILSIT TER
AIRCRAFT (1950S)
Ta i l s i t t e r s t o o k o f f
vertically and turned
horizontally in the air,
reversing the process
when landing. But
when pilots couldn’t
pull that off, the Navy
pulled the plug.3 / SPY AIRSHIPS
(2010S)
The Long-Endurance
Multi-Intelligence
Vehicle was buoyant
like a blimp and aero-
dynamic like a plane,
packing a 2,750-
pound-sensor payload
and keeping watch for
weeks. Blame delays
for its early demise.hoped to have ready for use by
- Had the U.S. actually built
this thing, it would have been
the most dangerous nuke ever
made—and possibly the last.
Aerospace giant Convair
designed SLAM (also known
as “The Big Stick”) as an air-
breathing, low-f lying cruise
missile. A rocket booster would
launch it into the air and send it
to speeds where its nuclear-pow-
ered ramjet would kick in. Once
activated, the engine would give
SLAM a top speed of Mach 3.5.
The missile would then cruise
for days or even weeks, flying
unusually low for a missile of its
time—just 1,000 feet—to avoid
being tracked by enemy radar.
The supersonic shockwave was
projected to leave a trail of dev-
astation, f lattening forests and
buildings, and killing anyone in
the missile’s f light path.
Despite being advertised as
a missile, SLAM was actually
more like an unmanned bomber.
Instead of a single warhead,
it carried up to 26 hydrogen
bombs, each hundreds of times
more powerful than the bombs
the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki in 1945. SLAM
could f ly a predetermined route
over an enemy country or even
continent, dropping H-bombs
on destinations below. Once the
Big Stick was out of bombs, the
weapon would f ly one last suicide
mission, running into a final tar-
get that would shower the target
zone with lethal radioactivity.
Of course, the U.S. never built
SLAM, because it was far too
dangerous to even test (although
most individual components,
including the reactor, were
successfully prototyped). The
military scrapped the weapon
in 1964 amid concerns about its
cost-effectiveness and viability.
While the hazardous levels of
radioactivity unleashed by the
nuclear engine were a big plus in
some apocalyptic wartime sce-
narios, the weapon couldn’t be
tested in the skies over the U.S.
SLAM was also supplanted by
intercontinental ballistic mis-
siles, which, for all their f laws,could deliver a thermonuclear
warhead against a target in Rus-
sia in half an hour.
SLAM was unofficially the
worst nuclear weapon ever devel-
oped. And whatever Russia was
really testing last summer in the
Arctic, it’s likely something that
should have remained an unused
relic of the Cold War, just like
our Big Stick.22 March 2020
7
COURTESY HILLER AVIATION MUSEUM (1); ICON IMAGES/ALAMY (2); COURTESY NORTHAM GRUMMAN (3)