There is no such thing as a Tactical nuclear weapon

During my long convalescence, I wrote several blog posts in my head. One of them concerned the talk about Russia's use of nuclear weapons. Since the talk has reemerged, I have decided to post it here. To make it of reasonable length, I have omitted an explanation of the difference between fission and fusion nuclear weapons. If anybody is interested, I can give that in a second post.

The distinction between tactics and strategy has a long history in discussions of military affairs. Tactics concerns choices on the battlefield. Whether to use massed archers before a cavalry attack, whether to combine infantry with a tank battalion, whether to defend a front with long dug in trenches – that sort of thing. Strategy concerns large-scale military decisions – the best example from recent wars is Hitler's disastrous decision to attempt to fight a two- front war, which was the source of his defeat.

Nuclear weapons were developed in the United States during the second world war by the so-called Manhattan project, headed by Robert Oppenheimer. The theory underlying the development was well-known by physicists around the world, but the technical problem of developing a usable nuclear weapon were formidable.

When the first prototype worked, it was so powerful that an entirely new term was invented to describe its magnitude. Bombs had been used in the first world war, in the Spanish Civil War, and extensively in the second world war. The convention had developed of classifying these bombs according to the amount of TNT equivalent to the explosive they contained. A 500 pound bomb was a bomb  whose explosive power was equivalent to 500 pounds of TNT. A bomb  rated at 1000 or 2000 pounds of TNT was called a "blockbuster" because even one of them could destroy several buildings in the city.   Oppenheimer and his associates invented the term "kiloton" or "1000 tons" to describe the bomb they created.

After the first prototype worked, Pres. Truman gave the order to use one against Japan. The war against Japan had for the most part consisted of a series of amphibious attacks of Pacific islands. Each island attack was extremely bloody.  Truman was told that an amphibious attack on Japan itself could cost a hundred thousand American lives. He therefore ordered that a nuclear weapon be dropped on a Japanese city in effect to terrify the Japanese into surrendering.  The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was rated at six or seven kilotons.  When the Japanese failed to surrender, Truman ordered a second somewhat more powerful bomb to be dropped on the city of Nagaski. This time, the military surrendered and the war was over.

That was the only time nuclear weapons have ever been used in war.

There are a good many old people around who were alive when these nuclear weapons were used – I am one of them. There are even some men still alive who were in the Army when they were used. But 79 years later there is no one in any army now who was alive when they were used. No Lieut., Major, Col., or General alive now was in the Armed forces when they were used.

In the 1960s, dispite a good deal of opposition From Oppenheimer andd others, the United States developed fusion or so-called hydrogen bombs, each of which was roughly 1000 times as powerful as the original fission bombs.Once again, a term had to be invented for them – megaton bombs.

Because the atomic bombs were too powerful to be used, for example, in the Korean War, an entirely new field of study called "deterrence theory" came into existence, staffed and developed not by soldiers but by psychologists and economists and political scientists. (This, by the way, was the subject of the first book I wrote, which I never got published.)

What is the point of all this:  it is widely assumed that the war between the United States and the Soviet Union using fusion bombs would last perhaps an hour or two before both countries would in effect be obliterated. Avoiding such a war (and, if you can believe it, actually planning for such a war) was clearly a matter of strategy.  By default, the fusion bombs – descendants of the bombs originally used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki were labeled "tactical nuclear weapons."

The war between Russia and Ukraine has been fought with traditional weapons, notably with the use of cruise missiles. A cruise missile is essentially a small pilotless airplane launched from as much as a thousand miles away, guided by radio and then pointed at its target.  Guided missiles can carry payloads of various sorts, but a typical guided missile carries a warhead equivalent to 1000 pounds of TNT.

A "5K tactical nuke", as they are jauntily referred to by supposedly knowledgeable military characters on television, would therefore be the equivalent of 10,000 guided missiles.  Since its warhead would have the explosive power 5 thousand tons of TNT, which is to say 10 million pounds of TNT, it would be as powerful as 10,000 guided missiles each of which carry explosives equivalent to 1000 pounds of TNT.

What earthly could use such a weapon be on the battlefield?  If two groups of massed tanks faced one another, it could certainly wipe out all of the Ukrainian tanks, but it would probably also wipe out all of the Russian tanks as well, and a good deal of the surrounding territory to boot. Depending on which way the wind was blowing, it would also kill the Russian commanders and everyone else in the neighborhood.

That is why there is no such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon.