The US Army successfully test-fired an atomic cannon exactly 69 years ago Tuesday. It was the first and only time the US military fired a nuclear weapon from one of the big cannons, according to the Army.

During the Cold War, the US military developed many ways to unleash nuclear destruction on an enemy, including a towed artillery piece built in the early 1950s that could fire a nuclear round packed with as much explosive power as the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima less than a decade earlier.

The Army’s M65 280 mm Motorized Heavy Gun, the largest mobile artillery piece the US ever built, was based on Nazi Germany’s Krupp K5 heavy railway gun, a devastating indirect-fire weapon Allied service members fighting in Italy during World War II named “Anzio Annie.”

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Weighing roughly 85 tons, the M65 cannon required two transporter trucks to move. In 1953, the US military moved two of these cannons by rail from Fort Sill in Oklahoma, to a test site in Nevada, where Army personnel used one of the two cannons to fire a nuclear artillery shell in the sole live-fire test of the weapon’s atomic capabilities.

On May 25, 1953, just a few months after an M65 cannon made a very public debut in the inaugural parade for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Army crews used a cannon named “Able Annie,” one of only 20 M65 guns ever made, to fire a nuclear shell.

Read more: yahoo