The Weapon NATO Hoped to ‘Ride’ To Victory If Russia Launched Nuke

The story of the Bradley Fighting Vechicle.

byKyle Mizokami

Fortunately for both, neither the Soviet Army nor the U.S. Army had to test the infantry fighting vehicle concept on a nuclear battlefield. It’s a testament to the shifting challenges of warfare that a vehicle designed in Moscow in 1955 could indirectly affect a vehicle serving in Iraq in 2009. We don’t know what will replace the M2 Bradley, and we know even less about where such a replacement might be called upon to fight. One thing’s for sure: whatever it is, it can probably do without port-firing weapons.

In the 1960s, the Soviet Army made a fateful decision: it could live with tactical nuclear warfare. In the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, armies on both sides of the Iron Curtain came to believe that nukes had become the dominant weapon in warfare. Yet, as time wore on, they also came to believe that fast-moving armies protected against radiation could still prevail on the battlefield. The result was, in a roundabout way, America’s first infantry fighting vehicle: the M2 Bradley.

The Soviet Army of the 1950s had invested a great deal in massive, highly mechanized forces. Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, with their overwhelming firepower, threatened to negate large armies—and large navies and large air forces too for that matter. But as the dominant land power of the twentieth century, Moscow could not give up its numerically superior armies. The answer was to figure out a way to fight through a nuclear war.

Soviet tanks had natural protection against the heat and blast of a nuclear weapon, but Soviet infantry in their open-topped armored personnel carriers were vulnerable. The result was the boyevaya mashina pekhoty (BMP), or infantry fighting vehicle (IFV). The BMP could carry an entire infantry squad and was armed with a seventy-three-millimeter gun launcher and AT-3 Sagger antitank missile. Infantry traveling inside could even shoot their AK-47 rifles through portholes on the side—although they rarely if ever did. Rather than dismounting during attacks, the Red Army infantry would fight mounted, and thus advance across the battlefield quickly—too quickly to be bracketed by tactical nuclear weapons.

In the West, military analysts were belatedly coming around to the same conclusion. The Army was still operating M113 armored personnel carriers. Lightly armed and armored, the M113’s sole job was to transport infantry to edge of battle, whereupon they would dismount and attack on foot. As the Soviets pointed out, however, the slow pace of dismounted infantry attacks virtually invited tactical nuclear weapons.

The United States Army decided it needed an infantry fighting vehicle of its own. The first effort, Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle–1965 (MICV-65) was based on the M109 self-propelled howitzer chassis. Equipped with a turret and twenty-millimeter cannon, it was eventually discarded as too heavy for air transport, and too slow to keep up with the German-American MBT-70 main battle tank.