Two Cold War weapons programs that sound invented and aren't. Project Blue Peacock was Britain's plan to bury ten atomic landmines on the North German Plain, designed at Fort Halstead in Kent and ordered by the Army Council in July 1957. Operation Popeye was the American cloud-seeding campaign flown out of Udorn, Thailand between 1967 and 1972, under the crew call sign Motorpool. Both are fully declassified now. Both came out sideways — one through an exhibition case at the National Archives, the other through a newspaper column and a Secretary of Defense who corrected his own sworn testimony eighteen months after he gave it.
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Sources:
Rob Edwards — "British army planned nuclear landmines" (New Scientist, 16 July 2003)
2. Jamie Wilson — "Nuclear mines 'to stop Soviets'" (The Guardian, 17 July 2003)
3. BBC News — "Cold war bomb warmed by chickens" (news article, 1 April 2004)
4. NPR Morning Edition — "Nuclear Chicken" (radio broadcast, 2 April 2004)
5. Richard Moore — "The Real Meaning of the Words: A Pedantic Glossary of British Nuclear Weapons," UK Nuclear History Working Paper No. 1 (King's College London, 2003/2004)
6. The National Archives, Kew — AVIA 65/2036, "BLUE PEACOCK: atomic land mine" (1955-1959)
7. The National Archives, Kew — ES 12/525, "ARDE. BLUE PEACOCK: climatic trial report" (October 1957)
8. The National Archives, Kew — WO 321/32, "Nuclear warhead development: BLUE PEACOCK" (1954-1959, retained)
9. Lorna Arnold — Britain and the H-Bomb (book, 2001)
10. Brian Cathcart — Test of Greatness: Britain's Struggle for the Atom Bomb (book, 1994)
11. John Baylis — Ambiguity and Deterrence: British Nuclear Strategy 1945-1964 (book, 1995)
12. Jonathan Aylen — "First Waltz: Development and Deployment of Blue Danube" (International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology, 2015)
13. Reiner Pommerin — "General Trettner und die Atom-Minen" (Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1991)
14. Adam Rawnsley and David Brown — "The Littlest Boy" (Foreign Policy, 30 January 2014)
15. Jack Murphy — We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History (book, 2024)
16. Frank Greve — interview with Louis Frank Napoli (Philadelphia Inquirer, 7 August 1994)
17. US Senate — Weather Modification: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Oceans and International Environment, Committee on Foreign Relations, 93rd Congress (government document, 25 January and 20 March 1974; Top Secret session made public 19 May 1974)
18. US Department of State — Foreign Relations of the United States 1964-68, Vol. XXVIII, Doc. 274 (government document)
19. Jack Anderson — "Washington Merry-Go-Round" column on secret rainmaking (Washington Post, mid-March 1971)
20. Seymour M. Hersh — "Rainmaking Is Used As Weapon by U.S." (New York Times, 3 July 1972)
21. Howard Kidwell — "Motorpool: The Rest of the Story" (Air Weather Reconnaissance Association newsletter, January 2005)
22. James Rodger Fleming — Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (book, Columbia University Press, 2010)
23. United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs — Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (treaty, 1977)
