Nuclear Chickens and Nonexistence

So over at Defense Tech is a lovely post about a bizarre scheme the Brits cooked up during the Cold War to use chickens to keep nuclear landmines warm. I am constantly amazed by the vast variety of weird ideas the military has seriously considered over the years.

This also reminds me of a story from my misspent youth. There is a field manual about the use of certain devices. It explicitly states that such devices are not in the US inventory because of treaty obligations, &c, &c. Then it provides a table giving weights, dimensions and yields of a series of hypothetical devices. The dimensions are given to the millimeter and the weights to nearest hundred grams. I always had a sneaking suspicion that there might just be one or two lying around somewhere that they measured to get the dimensions and everything.