Blue Peacock

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Blue Peacock - dubbed the "chicken-powered nuclear bomb" - was the codename of a British project in the 1950s with the goal to store a number of ten-kiloton nuclear mines in Germany, to be placed at target locations on the North German Plain in the case of war. The mines would have been detonated by wire or an eight-day timer. If they were disturbed they were set to explode within ten seconds. The project was developed at the Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) at Fort Halstead in Kent in 1954.

The Blue Peacock consisted of a huge steel sphere casing containing a plutonium core surrounded by high explosives. The design was based on the free falling Blue Danube, but the Blue Peacock weighed 7.2 tons. The steel casing was so large that it had to be tested outdoors in a flooded gravel pit near Sevenoaks in Kent.

In July 1957 the British Army ordered ten Blue Peacocks for use in Germany, under the cover story that they were atomic power units for troops in the field. In the end, though, the Ministry of Defence cancelled the project in February 1958. It was judged that the risks posed by the nuclear fallout and the political aspects of preparing for destruction and contamination of allied territory were simply too high to justify.

One technical problem was that buried objects—especially during winter—can get very cold, and it was possible the mine would not have worked after some days underground, due to the electronics being too cold to operate properly. Various methods to get around this were studied, such as wrapping the bombs in insulating blankets. However, one proposal was sufficiently outlandish in a Rube Goldberg device type way, that it was taken as an April Fool's Day joke when the Blue Peacock file was declassified on April 1, 2004. Tom O'Leary, head of education and interpretation at the National Archives, replied to the media that, "It does seem like an April Fool but it most certainly is not. The Civil Service does not do jokes."

The design proposed that live chickens should be included in the mechanism. The chickens would be sealed inside the casing, with a supply of food and water; they would remain alive for a week or so, which was the expected maximum lifetime of the bomb in any case. The body heat given off by the chickens would, it seems, have been sufficient to keep all the relevant components at a working temperature.