SADM "Green Light" Team

Special Forces teams trained to jump, swim, or hike behind enemy lines with a 58-pound man-portable nuclear weapon — the W54 warhead, ~1 kt yield — and detonate it on bridges, tunnels, or hardened targets.

The Story

The mission timer was often shorter than the minimum safe-escape distance. Internal SF folklore treated Green Light as a one-way ticket. By 1988 the last ~300 SADMs were withdrawn from the NATO arsenal.