Remember as a kid when you’d play ‘rock, paper, scissors’ and then some Smart aleck would end the game by throwing a ‘nuclear bomb!’? Well that’s kinda what the US Army did in the 1950s when they first rolled out the M65 artillery piece—better known as Atomic Annie.
Why
Even if you didn’t make A’s in your junior high history class, you likely still know that World War 2’s final chapter came after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, twice. But even after this devastating display of military might brought an end to the most immediate hostilities, the US found soon herself headed towards a forty year long Cold War. This new icy conflict pitted the enormous military machine of the Soviet Union and her allies against US-led NATO powers. The US and her allies were outnumbered on the ground–guarding the border between these two bruisers were up to 50,000 Soviet tanks, the living embodiment of the Iron Curtain.
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What was needed, as had been needed not but a decade before, was a secret weapon to even the odds.
Enter the M65
The concept of a nuclear artillery shell enraptured the Army brass in the late 1940s. The thing was, atomic weapons were large beasts, so large in fact that the only guns that could lob one looked like something you find acrobats using at the circus.