Stranger than fiction...
During the Cold War, there were contingency plans in case the Soviet Union attempted to roll their tanks across Europe. The goal would be to stop them at all cost, and this would require obliterating key highways, tunnels, airfields, and bridges. While conventional explosives might do the job, it would take hours to achieve, and only slow the Soviet advance by days at best, when weeks were needed. Project GREENLIGHT sought to address this problem.
The fastest, most effective, most surreptitious way to target enemy infrastructure would be to parachute bomb-toting Special Forces soldiers to their objectives. But there was a catch. In his autobiography, Sergeant Major Joe Garner described his work with the project. There was a heavy rucksack attached to him when he test jumped from a military helicopter. The landing was rough, but he walked away from it. It was proof-positive that the plan would work, but it wasn’t until much later that he learned what GREENLIGHT was. “It was a man-carried nuclear device. That’s when the realization hit me. I was probably the first soldier to free-fall strapped to an atomic bomb.”
In addition to destroying infrastructure, carefully placed atomic blasts would make enemy forces “bottleneck,” where they could be destroyed with other nuclear weapons. Three hundred backpack nukes were made. They were called Special Atomic Demolition Munitions, and most were assigned to 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) in Germany. In a worst-case scenario, their job was to strap on one-kiloton nuclear weapons and parachute behind the Iron Curtain. They would commit nuclear suicide in an apocalyptic war to stop the Soviets from conquering Europe.
Thankfully, of course, the weapons were never used.
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/133848
This was frighteningly real. Here's the H-912 transport container for Mk-54 SADM (Special Atomic Demolition Munition):
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Munition
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