Your Favorite Abandoned Cold War Projects

A few of my own:

The Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program. Ran from 1945 to 1960, trying to build a nuclear-powered bomber. Got a lot closer than you might think, including static-testing a pair of atomic turbojets. Although the project was cancelled by McNamara, it continued showing up periodically in DoD studies throughout the 60s and 70s, including my personal favorite incarnation: the CL-1201, an 11,000,000 pound atomic-powered flying wing that could carry 22 parasite fighters. In other words, a flying aircraft carrier.

The Deep Underground Command Center, or DUCC, a bunker buried 3,500 feet under Washington and designed to survive multiple direct hits by 300 megaton nuclear weapons.

The various incarnations of superhard missile basing: basically, underground missile bases designed to survive direct hits by high-yield nuclear weapons. There were a bunch of variations on this. One of my favorites comes from the Golden Arrow study: now, it's theoretically possible to bury a missile deeply enough to survive anything, but there are limits to how hard you can make the access tunnel, given that it needs to end up on the surface. So the missile itself may survive, but it's useless since it can't actually launch. Golden Arrow's solution: bury tunneling machines with 50 missiles under a mountain in the Rockies. The solution was a bit limited in that it had a reaction time measured in days - not to mention costing a President's Ransom - but it could, in principle, survive anything the Soviets could throw at it.

Besides superhard basing, all the stuff they came up with for the MX. This included: air-mobile, air-launched missiles; air-mobile, ground-launched missiles; missiles on trains; missiles on hovercraft; missiles on barges in the Great Lakes; missiles in crawlers in canals; missiles in underwater silos; missiles on "underwater vehicles" (which was not a submarine, since that would be the Navy's job); missiles in orbit; missiles on trucks on the highways; missiles on trucks in underground tunnels; missiles on the wrong side of a vertical mountain; "densepack"; and, of course, racetrack itself.

The best Ballistic Missile Defense scheme ever: burying high-yield nuclear bombs just north of the missile fields, and setting them off as the Soviet warheads approached. The dust and shrapnel thrown up would shred the incoming warheads. Apparently even the Federation of American Scientists agreed this would work, for a strict definition of "work", but even Reagan never tried to build this as far as I know.

Project Helios, aka Project Orion's little brother. Instead of riding the shockwave, Helios planned to use atomic bombs to heat propellant in a gigantic combustion chamber. There was an airplane version of this as well, although I don't know if this was something the Helios Project itself came up with, or an invention of popular authors.

The atomic internal combustion engine. This was an AEC scheme from the 50s: gaseous uranium hexafluoride would be held subcritical in a piston. The piston would contract, compressing the fuel and sending it critical, which would heat it up and cause the piston to expand. Repeat as needed. In principle, this could be the ultimate in miniaturized reactors, since you don't need a turbine or heat exchanger. Unfortunately, they apparently didn't have the materials to build this and not have the UF6 eat the piston. I'm not sure if that's the whole story, however, since I haven't yet been able to track down any details.
 
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Couldn't find this in the posts:
The Soviet Doomsday Machine

Truth is always stranger than fiction, so it’s no wonder that Stanley Kubrick’s absurd comedy Dr. Strangelove is actually premised on fact. The strange truth here was that Nikita Khrushchev and company had actually been plotting to build a "doomsday" device. The plan called for a large cargo ship anchored off the Soviet Union’s east coast to be loaded with hundreds of hydrogen bombs. If at any point the radiation detectors aboard the ship measured a certain amount of atmospheric radiation, indicating that the Soviet Union had been attacked, the bombs would detonate. Soviet scientists persuaded Khrushchev to drop this mad scheme.

Info from this site
http://www.neatorama.com/2007/06/05/bigger-is-better-7-insane-soviet-projects/
 
I genuinely cannot believe that the Fairey Rotodyne and the EM-2 didn't make it onto this list. I thought that Paras with Dan Dare-bullpups hopping out of compound gyroplanes would have sent a particular subset of this boarad weak at the knees!
 
I genuinely cannot believe that the Fairey Rotodyne and the EM-2 didn't make it onto this list. I thought that Paras with Dan Dare-bullpups hopping out of compound gyroplanes would have sent a particular subset of this boarad weak at the knees!

Well, I like the Rotodyne, but its not on my list of favorite abandoned Cold War projects. I would have liked to see it built, just to see one in person.
 
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