You think that's crazy, you should see some of the other things the Army was working on at around the same time.

At least the M65 could lob its atomic payload a respectable distance away from the people operating it. That wasn't as true of the "Davy Crockett" atomic rifle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_devic...), though, which could fire an extremely low-yield (equivalent to 10-20 tons of TNT) atomic warhead a distance of 1-2 miles, tops. That would probably have been far enough to avoid killing the operators of the weapon when it went off, though if the wind was blowing the wrong way they would have had some nasty exposure to radiation.

And beyond even that was the so-called "Special Atomic Demolition Munition" (SADM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Muni...), which used the same warhead as used on the Davy Crockett, only this time packed into a backpack (!). The idea was that a soldier would either hump the backpack to the target on foot or be air-dropped in with it, plant the backpack near a strategic target, set a detonation timer on it, and then run like hell. Foreign Policy magazine ran a good article about what it was like to be one of the guys tasked with this mission a few years back (https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/30/the-littlest-boy/). Spoiler alert, it was kind of a stressful job.