It could only have happened at the height of cold war paranoia. To counter the threat of Soviet invasion, the UK planned to bury 10 huge nuclear
landmines in Germany, declassified army documents from the 1950s reveal.
The extraordinary weapon was designed to cause mass destruction and radioactive contamination over a wide area to prevent an occupation by Soviet
forces. Each mine was expected to produce an explosive yield of 10 kilotons, about half that of the atom bomb the US dropped on the Japanese city of
Nagasaki in 1945.
The mines were to be left buried or submerged by the British Army of the Rhine. They would then have been detonated by wire from up to five kilometres
away or by an eight-day clockwork timer. If disturbed or damaged, they were primed to explode within 10 seconds.
"It may look bizarre now, but this weapon was a product of its time," says Lesley Wright, who is researching the history of the UK's nuclear
weapons programmes at Liverpool John Moores University. "It was a response to the perceived threat of overwhelming Soviet superiority in conventional
weapons," Wright says.
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