Atomic Annie

That long barreled gun on display near Junction City is Atomic Annie, one of the strangest weapons the United States ever built. In the early nineteen fifties, at the dawn of the Cold War, the Army wanted a cannon that could fire an actual nuclear shell from the ground. The result was the M sixty-five, a two hundred eighty millimeter cannon weighing some eighty-three tons, its design borrowed from a German railroad gun.

On May twenty-fifth, nineteen fifty-three, one of these cannons fired a fifteen kiloton atomic shell at the Nevada Test Site, the only time a nuclear artillery round was ever launched from a gun. Only twenty were ever built. This one, which never fired in anger, was brought to Fort Riley in nineteen seventy-four by the commander of the First Infantry Division and set up here as a monument to an idea the world decided it could live without.