Another Cold War Ghost Story

By Poetrooper
Yesterday, in response to Dave’s article, “Ghosts for the Gullible” all of the comments I read were full of sarcasm and scorn for a soldier and his widow because TAH readers have seen and heard it all. But I do know that the best con jobs are always seeded with just enough of the truth to render them credible which could be the case here. Reading the piece I recalled events of decades ago when I was a Battalion and Brigade Chemical, Biological and Radiological NCO in the 101st and 82d Airborne. I cannot pinpoint precisely where and when I first heard that we had special operations teams infiltrating North Korea, as well as many Soviet satellite countries, with backpack portable nuclear weapons.

I think my first knowledge of the B-54 warhead itself came during the nuclear portion of my training at the Army CBR School at Ft. McClellan, AL, in 1965. It was derived from the W-54 warhead of the Davy Crockett Jeep-mounted nuke launcher then assigned to infantry units. As I recall, we discussed the radiation output of portable nuclear devices, both ours and the Russian version, but not that we had teams operating behind enemy lines with them. That was speculation reserved for the NCO Club, where, of course, we agreed that common sense dictated that would have to be the case to effectively employ such a weapon.

BackPack Nuclear Weapon

I also vaguely recall a hotel bar discussion at a special operations medical conference maybe fifteen years ago where someone said he had once served with a senior NCO who’d been on a team that prepositioned such weapons in North Korea. I recollect more recently, though probably more than ten years ago, a military internet article about Israel’s nuclear capabilities, where it was conjectured IDF/Mossad had their own version of such backpack nukes and had stashed many of them within key cities and military installations of many Middle Eastern opponents. I also remember hearing many years ago that we had nukes prepositioned in the Fulda Gap and other key invasion routes in Europe as well as on the Korean peninsula but that doesn’t necessarily mean they were B-54’s.

In any event, it took about twenty seconds of web-searching to pull up this 2014 online article from the Smithsonian website, For 25 Years, U.S. Special Forces Carried Miniature Nukes on Their Backs, which certainly verifies my past sources. And this link, The Littlist Boy, will provide you with more history of the program, which was officially declassified in 2014. I think we should consider that if this nuke program, which never kidnapped or killed any foreign politicians or generals, remained classified fifty years, similar programs run by the obsessively secretive CIA, which has done illegal things, if they did exist would likely still be tightly classified. Notably the initial timelines for the nuke operations and the so-called Ghost Walker ops do approximate; and while I agree that it is quite unlikely an ordinary infantry soldier or military policeman would be tapped for such shadowy operations and the DD-214’s do assuredly look bogus, could it be that Dunagan heard of the nuke ops and appropriated them as the base for his fables? But, is it also possible he could have been involved in some clandestine operations in an ancillary way such as providing security? As a young MP at Fort Campbell, I served on security details for nuclear warhead transportation from Clarksville Navy Base to Campbell Army Airfield. We weren’t supposed to know what was going on but of course we did. Perhaps Dunagan had some sort of tangential experience with black ops and like so many we see here at TAH, decided to embellish his own record.

Category: Cold War