7 obscure yet unbelievable military weapons

The Nazi betrayal of the Soviet Union during World War II caught Moscow completely off guard. In a desperate attempt at staving off the Nazi advance into their territory, the Soviets strapped dogs with explosives and trained them to run under German tanks.

Soviet propaganda claims that around 300 German tanks were destroyed in this manner. The anti-tank dog program continued until 1996.

At the height of World War II, the Imperial Japanese Navy commissioned a series of Sen Toku I-400 class submarines. These subs were large enough to carry three Aichi M6A Seiran aircraft underwater, surface and launch the planes, and then dive again. The submarines were also equipped with torpedoes.

A total of three of them were completed.

Conventional nuclear weapons are capable of destroying entire cities, but during the Cold War, the idea of "tactical" nuclear weapons also emerged.

These smaller nukes were limited-yield weapons that would be launched from the ground at targets on the battlefield. Nuclear artillery was delivered with shells and short-range rockets.

In the late 1950s, the US tested the Davey Crockett, a low-yield recoilless rifle that fired a small nuclear warhead — but the weapon was soon considered impractical, in part because of its potential danger to friendly forces in any potential battlefield scenario.

The 300-foot-long Lun-class Ekranoplane flew a mere four meters above the ground or water through a hovercraft-like effect generated by its wings. It was intended to be a revolutionary transport vessel, bigger than any plane and faster than any ship. It was also capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

But the science fiction-like vessel never entered into wide production and was never used in action.

Kaiten torpedoes were built by the Imperial Japanese Navy and were in service between 1944 and 1945. These torpedoes were manned and were a variant of the suicide weapons that Japan resorted to towards the end of the war.

The torpedoes were launched from submarines and the pilots of the torpedoes could steer the weapons as necessary to inflict maximum damage against an enemy.

Pigeon-guided missiles were developed by noted behaviorist B.F. Skinner during the World War II-era Project Pigeon. Although the project was ultimately canceled because of the impracticality of the weapons, the idea of pigeon-guided missiles showed promise in an era before the development of sophisticated electronic guidance systems.

The missile had an array of lenses at the front that projected an image of the target to an interior screen. The pigeons were conditioned to peck at the target on the screen. The pigeon's pecks corrected the missile's flight path.