Oh dear.... Never heard of this but I'm glad the cold war is over.
"Alright chaps, let's bury some 10 kiloton nuclear mines in Germany in case the Russians come.", From wikipedia: "deny occupation of the area to an enemy for an appreciable time due to contamination"
"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 too high to justify. "
Ummmmmm yeah WOULD YOU THINK???
"One particularly remarkable proposal suggested that live chickens 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. Their body heat would, it seems, have been sufficient to keep the mine's components at a working temperature."
Ok...... Now I'm really wondering if the Soviets were the crazy ones.
I present you https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/30/the-littlest-boy/ which also was to be deployed into prepared shafts to make some area impassable. The keyword here would be
"Wallmeister" for the people tasked with that mission.
> Cold War strategy was filled with oxymorons like "limited nuclear war," but the backpack nuke was perhaps the most darkly comic manifestation of an age struggling to deal with the all-too-real prospect of Armageddon. The SADM was a case of life imitating satire. After all, much like Slim Pickens1 in the iconic finale of Dr. Strangelove, American soldiers would strap on atomic bombs and jump out of airplanes as part of the opening act of World War III.
> From the Army's perspective, the problem was that bombers and missiles were managed by the Air Force and the Navy, leaving the ground force out of arguably the most significant development in the history of war, even as its soldiers would be chiefly responsible for stopping a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Fortunately for the Army, many U.S. strategists still saw nukes simply as bigger conventional bombs, and America's post-Hiroshima mastery of the cutting-edge science of atomic destruction had filled weapons designers more with a sense of the possible than the prudent. The result was a series of odd creations that made their way into the Army's arsenal, from atomic artillery to nuclear-tipped air-defense missiles.
It's a matter of signal to noise. There's a lot of clutter out there, and most radars have some level of filtering. Most stealth is detectable, but lost in the noise.
