I suppose you've come here to learn something about that strangest of weapons, The Atomic Cannon.

You're not alone in your ignorance, we all have the same questions; the same uneasy feeling about the atomic cannon.

This is a research site, for what it's worth. Born by accident. An outgrowth of the searching Viet Nam veterans stationed in Phu Bai, RVN during the Sixties and early Seventies and the happy circumstance of connecting with one of the original crew assigned to the support the cannon.

This sites purpose is to examine just what factors contributed to the creation of this beast and what impact it had on the world, if any.

What struck me most about her was that she seems to be really a very Spartan field piece. I expected, atleast, to see an elaborate control platform of some sort. Nope. She has a lever with "ram", "neutral", "withdraw" to ativate the shell-loading mechanism and another with "elevate" ("obscured by paint"). I'll assume the other two positions were "idle" and "lower". Both were hydraulically activated. Right and left positioning seemed to be controlled by the drivers fore and aft. She has two cabs that allowed her to manauever through the small burghs in the European theatre of operations after the war. (_*) There was a disc underneath the apex of the gun that might have also controlled that movement, but the hydraulics werent obvious to me (I'll check on that).

I was also amazed to see that there was actually a cranking mechanism connected to a series of gears to do the job manually if need be. An atomic weapon deviod of any electronics that I could see, except those that pushed her hydraulic plungers. Not at all what we've become accustomed to in the second half of the 20th century.