Blue Peacock - Wikipedia

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2023-01-25 07:00:06

Blue Peacock, renamed from Blue Bunny and originally Brown Bunny, was a British tactical nuclear weapon project in the 1950s.

The project's goal was to store a number of ten-kiloton nuclear land mines in Germany. These mines which were intended to be placed on the North German Plain and detonated by wire or an eight-day timer[1] in the event of Soviet invasion from the east,[2] in order to "...not only destroy facilities and installations over a large area, but to deny occupation of the area to an enemy for an appreciable time due to contamination..."[3]

Blue Peacock was designed after the free-falling Blue Danube and weighed 7.2 long tons (7,300 kg). A total of two firing units were built: the casing and the warhead. Due to its large steel casing, it had to be tested outdoors in a flooded gravel pit near Sevenoaks in Kent.[3] Since the bomb would be unattended, anti-tampering devices were also used.[4] The casing was pressurized, and pressure and tilt switches were added.[4] The warhead could be detonated via three methods: a wire located three miles (4.8 km) away, an eight-day timer, or anti-tampering devices. Once armed, Blue Peacock would detonate ten seconds after being moved, if the casing lost pressure, or if it was filled with water.[4]

The project was developed at the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) at Fort Halstead in Kent in 1954.[citation needed ]

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