On 17 July 1962, a caravan of scientists, military men, and dignitaries crossed the remote desert of southern Nevada to witness an historic event. Among the crowd were VIPs such as Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and presidential adviser General Maxwell D. Taylor who had come to observe the “Little Feller I” test shot, the final phase of Operation Sunbeam. The main attraction was a secret device which was bolted to the roof of an armored personnel carrier, a contraption called the The Davy Crockett Weapon System.
Named after the famous American folk hero, this defense apparatus was based on the tried-and-true recoilless rifle, a launcher similar to the shoulder-fired tubes used in the Second World War. Such weapons were designed to counteract much of their recoil by routing some expanding gas out the rear end, thereby producing forward thrust at the same moment that the projectile pushes the gun backwards. But the Davy Crockett Weapon System did improve on the concept in one important way: it paired this dead-simple launch device with a tiny fission bomb, making it the most convenient nuclear bomb delivery system ever developed.
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