They haven’t been called that since the 70’s and 80’s when they first entered what is euphemistically called the nuclear arsenal, but that doesn’t make them any less real. We’re talking about theater nuclear weapons, or tactical nuclear weapons, or battlefield nukes if you prefer, but they amount to the same thing: small nuclear weapons, usually mounted as warheads on short-range missiles, that can be used to destroy targets in the midst of a conventional war that is already under way. Which targets, you might ask? Well, they were designed, back in the day, to knock out concentrations of enemy troops and tanks without doing too much damage to surrounding buildings and infrastructure. Why was the weapon designed this way? I can assure you it wasn’t out of the goodness of our nation’s war making heart.
There is one way to stop this madness. I won't write it because it's not supposed to be said out loud, but I sure hope there are some particularly sharp tactically outfitted people on the ground in Moscow waiting for the proper moment against a certain person who has gone amok on his ego and weapons.
God I can't stand being thrown back into the Cuban Missile Crisis, when cooler heads prevailed..and we sidestepped it one or two minutes to 12.
I don't want to know what the time is on the nuclear time clock.
Back when, the quip was that that these small tactical nuclear weapons were designed by Republicans because they killed people without destroying property.
I'm partial to the notion that Putin's inner circle will steadily shrink to the point where the loyalists can be overwhelmed by outsiders. Not quite like Valkyrie, the plot to kill Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944, because Putin is not a populist leader, he doesn't get the fanatical loyalty that Hitler could claim for himself. No one shouts the Russian equivalent of 'Heil Hitler', and no one in the armed forces takes an oath of personal loyalty to Putin. Just looking at the fifty-foot table that separates Putin from his poodles convinces me that he must be wearing Kevlar skivvies underneaththat cheap suit he wears. Putin is the apparatchik who wants to be a King. He has no idea how a king is supposed to act. A crime boss can never be a king, and all post-Bolshevik Russian leaders were crime bosses. NATO is going to need to remind Russians that we have better stuff than they do, and their quality control hasn't been all that impressive. Russians were assured that they would be dining on Chicken Kiev a month ago. I want them to wonder whether they can afford to buy food and put clothes on their backs. This is going to be an experiment in behavior modification on a grand scale. After World War II, we had three years of 'tough love' toward our former enemies Germany and Japan, followed by normal relationships. The lessons appeared to take hold. We weren't enemies forever, but we certainly made it clear that we wouldn't tolerate their former totalitarianism. As soon as they turned a corner we were there to help.
The long-standing practice of 'samizdat', self-publishing by dissidents, is inevitably going to undercut Putin's narrative of Russia's holy destiny. The West's economic warfare against Russia promises impoverishment, now and for as long as Putin clings to power. All that needs to be done now is send an unending stream of pictures over the Internet showing seized yachts and palatial estates that Russian oligarchs have purchased with Russia's stolen wealth. And then let envy and privation do the rest. Paired photos of yachts and villas juxtaposed with destroyed cities, dead Russian soldiers, destroyed armor, and fleeing refugees. Everybody has a smart phone. Putin's crude propaganda is no match against samizdat.
Cutting Russians' purchasing power by 90 percent doesn't destroy cities, but it does remind them of the price they are paying for allowing Putin to act with impunity. Those quarter-million Russians who pulled up stakes and headed elsewhere invariably left family behind. The left-behinds have no reason to hope for any kind of a decent future. Destroying the Russian banks and isolating them from the international banking system means 'no recourse'. No care packages or money remittances.
Top-down revolutions like Valkyrie rarely work. Bottom-up revolution works, but it takes more time. The West's message to the Russian people needs to be that they need to decide whether Putin is worth keeping, and their misery will deepen until they get rid of him. Their world will rot before their eyes. Transportation will revert to what it was under communism. The walls will close in on them. No foreign trade. The drabness that existed in the Post-war years will return. Russians need to know that. They need to find a way to live in our world, and on terms we in the West can live with.
If Putin is taken at his word that he intends to destroy democracy and Western values, we need respond appropriately by attacking his grandiose self-image and his arrogance. He and Trump are two sides of the same coin. Both need to be called to account and punished severely. We were shortsighted in treating Putin as Russia's problem alone; and I want to ensure that we don't make that mistake again.
Thanks for the latest history lesson, Lucian. My nuclear nightmares have been reignited since Putin made his not so veiled threats a month ago. Our collective memory is sorely lacking, and you have the knack for bringing out the true journalistic gems. I was a teenager when that article came out (I'm sure I read it at the time) and was very familiar with nuclear weapons and delivery systems and "strategy" reading Scientific American and Herman Kahn "Thinking About the Unthinkable" (teenage military history nerd, and peacenik at the same time). How matter of fact they are about millions of lives snuffed out in an instant......as you say the rules of the Big Playground.
Tactical nuclear weapons make previously unthinkable nuclear war, thinkable. Sooner rather than later somebody will use one somewhere. And then the cry will go out, "They nuked us! Roll out Big Bertha, we'll teach 'em a lesson." As these tactical nuclear weapons proliferate the probability of someone using one somewhere approaches 1. I re-watched "Dr. Strangelove" a few weeks ago.
I was reading that MacArthur was within a few hours of using atomic weapons along the Yalu for just such a purpose back in 1950, suggesting that the bombs be salted with cobalt in order to create what he called a "radiation corridor" that would prevent the Chinese from coming back into North Korea. Once that war settled into stalemate, Curtis LeMay proceeded to fire bomb North Korea until not a single building was left standing above the 38th parallel. It took 3 years but it was the same thing as if he dropped atomics on them. Perhaps a casualties were a little lower, but blowing up their dams caused enough starvation to correct that.
Although MacArthur was fired for wanting to prosecute the war into China with the a-bomb, the threat of tactical nuclear weapons was how NATO counterbalanced the overwhelming numerical superiority of Soviet forces for many years. They were the bargaining chip that Kennedy used to get Soviet missiles out of Cuba in 1962, a bunch of obsolete missiles in Turkey pointed straight down the Soviet throat.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. Even Putin as a minor KGB official with no military experience must realize that the reserve forces he would be bringing up are so much worse than the crappy Russian military we've already seen. Nukes are probably looking more attractive, particularly if you see the recent video of how the reserves are handling artillery shells by tossing them out of trucks like they were sandbags
I do think that the idea the United States only has a couple hundred of these things is smoke mirrors, since the military has never been moderate. Eye for an eye gets pretty awful after the second eye since both sides are swinging blind at one another.
On a positive note, I'm going to look for that Hotel California story. It sounds fantastic. You were way ahead of the game since we're seeing so many documentaries about record producers and famous music studios these days.
Thanks again for all your diligent, hard work and excellent reporting. You're setting a great example.
Great retrospective! I'm old enough to remember when "neutron bomb" was a new term to encounter in newspapers and magazines. (And that particular magazine was a valued periodical.)
My recollection was that at the time, the US and NATO was convinced that the Warsaw Pact's alleged superiority in numbers of conventional forces was giving the Commies way too much incentive to attack West Germany and overrun all Europe. And in lightning speed -- and then the Soviets would supposedly defy the West to do anything about it, and accept the fait accompli rather than risk armageddon. (Possibly some of the same feeling motivating Putin today.) So this neutron bomb deus ex machina was going to allow us, the Good Guys, to stop a conventional attack in its tracks without resorting to "dirty" nukes on the battlefield -- we could destroy a Soviet attack and spare the West German cities (more or less). Hurray for the cavalry!
Best of all, these "tactical" low-yield nukes wouldn't NECESSARILY provoke a strategic nuclear response. They would allow outmanned NATO forces to create a stalemate on the conventional battlefield. Such was the theory. So the West got deterrence -- at a fraction of the expense and effort of fielding conventional forces -- while at the same time stopping the escalation process that inevitably led to full-scale nuclear exchange. At least, that's what I remember the sales pitch as being.
Critics pointed out that this might make a NATO/Warsaw Pact clash MORE likely, less likely, because the Commies might just think the West was pussyfooting around with dinky nukes and wouldn't in fact use them, or if they did, it wouldn't be enough to make a difference. Or that reliance on "tactical" nuclear weapons indicated a weakness of resolve. Or that the Warsaw Pact would simply field their OWN neutron bombs. Or that it was immoral to introduce weapons that killed people but left buildings intact. Or something. It was long ago and under much different circumstances, and I haven't tried to research the issue.
An interesting time, tho'. Seems almost quaint now. I also remember having the Simulations Publications, Inc., wargame "NATO" back in the 70s -- a hex-based boardgame based on scenarios for a hypothetical invasion of the NATO border with the Warsaw Pact, the mapboard stretching from Denmark to Austria. The times I played it with my college roommate, the Warsaw Pact armies coming, guns blazing, out of East Germany -- the usual scenario -- always bogged down a short way into West Germany and failed to get out of Czechoslovakia to any degree. Then the ever-increasing NATO armies would start pushing back the enemy. All this without nukes. Optional rules allowed for the introduction of nuclear weapons, but inevitably, these led to full-blown strategic nuclear war, and in the words of the game designers, "simulate this by squirting lighter fluid on the map and lighting a match."
No winners.
BTW, secondhand copies of this game, originals or reprint editions, can still be found on ebay and such collectors' sites. It's a dated game, but instructive. It seems that even then, the sober designers, working from all the best available orders of battle and demonstrated effectiveness they could find, worked out that the Warsaw Pact wasn't the feared all-conquering horde so many in the West feared.
Tactical nuclear weapons are too easy to use because they are viewed as limited and narrowly focused in their destructive power. Yet, an “exchange”
of them by adversaries leads to the same stalemate now seen from the conventional means of warfare in Ukraine. And with a stalemate, one side will be tempted to escalate to break the stalemate. And what is left to do that with? Regular nuclear weapons, the Big Ones.
So starting down the road of using tactical nuclear weapons leaves you with the same result - total and absolute world-wide devastation.
I don't know how you produce such good and detailed articles with such a short turn around, but I certainly am glad to be a subscriber.
With the news that N. Korea just fired off a missile with a range that would include the western half of this country, I gave up worrying. Two trigger happy "maniacal narcissists" (perfect description btw) makes the odds of survival less every day. I shall be thankful for the time I have left.
When I look at the pictures of the damage in Ukrainian cities, it is difficult to distinguish them from photos of the Hiroshima aftermath. Nukes are more devastating for sure, but the longer this conflict persists, the more the results become the same. Leveled cities and thousands dead.
Russian military leaders read much of what is offered in the west. They must be thinking, "Biden can't lose Ukraine, Ted Cruz will win in 2024, or maybe Trump if he hasn't been indicted." Somewhere, Putin must have listened to someone tell him what might happen. All of this terrible. My fear is Zelenskyy will decide the west will sacrifice either part or all of Ukraine, so he goes to the Israeli's or maybe N. Korea and makes a deal for a small nuke to scare Moscow. This war is not going to end well. I still think the west will betray Ukraine and cut a deal with Putin. Europe and America don't want 20 million refugees or have to pay billions to rebuild Ukraine.
To address some of your concerns -- North Korea is a pariah state with no ties to Ukraine, and why would they want to provoke Russia in this way? Israel has been strangely non-committal about this war, and relies on Russian backing to an odd degree in some arcane ways. They have established a status quo, see-no-evil arrangement in Syria that allows for both party's strategic interests to be protected and preventing accidents between their militaries. No, I don't see Israel getting involved in this at all, the Israelis have nothing to gain.
I agree only so far. This war puts everyone into a strange place. I don't think it will end up with atomic weapons but I think Israel wants to be a player because it helps their economic ambitions with Europe. China or N. Korea might feel the same, do you see the speculative theme in what I'm saying? Do not assume anything.
Whatever happened to the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances entered into on 5 December 1994 to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The memorandum was originally signed by three nuclear powers: the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. China and France gave somewhat weaker individual assurances in separate documents. The memorandum prohibited the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
Doesn't this agreement which quite obviously Russia has violated, obligate the U.S. and UK and possibly France and China to defend Ukraine?
There is one way to stop this madness. I won't write it because it's not supposed to be said out loud, but I sure hope there are some particularly sharp tactically outfitted people on the ground in Moscow waiting for the proper moment against a certain person who has gone amok on his ego and weapons.
God I can't stand being thrown back into the Cuban Missile Crisis, when cooler heads prevailed..and we sidestepped it one or two minutes to 12.
I don't want to know what the time is on the nuclear time clock.
Those science guys might want to meet up and advance that minute hand a bit. Chilling.
Back when, the quip was that that these small tactical nuclear weapons were designed by Republicans because they killed people without destroying property.
I'm partial to the notion that Putin's inner circle will steadily shrink to the point where the loyalists can be overwhelmed by outsiders. Not quite like Valkyrie, the plot to kill Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944, because Putin is not a populist leader, he doesn't get the fanatical loyalty that Hitler could claim for himself. No one shouts the Russian equivalent of 'Heil Hitler', and no one in the armed forces takes an oath of personal loyalty to Putin. Just looking at the fifty-foot table that separates Putin from his poodles convinces me that he must be wearing Kevlar skivvies underneaththat cheap suit he wears. Putin is the apparatchik who wants to be a King. He has no idea how a king is supposed to act. A crime boss can never be a king, and all post-Bolshevik Russian leaders were crime bosses. NATO is going to need to remind Russians that we have better stuff than they do, and their quality control hasn't been all that impressive. Russians were assured that they would be dining on Chicken Kiev a month ago. I want them to wonder whether they can afford to buy food and put clothes on their backs. This is going to be an experiment in behavior modification on a grand scale. After World War II, we had three years of 'tough love' toward our former enemies Germany and Japan, followed by normal relationships. The lessons appeared to take hold. We weren't enemies forever, but we certainly made it clear that we wouldn't tolerate their former totalitarianism. As soon as they turned a corner we were there to help.
The long-standing practice of 'samizdat', self-publishing by dissidents, is inevitably going to undercut Putin's narrative of Russia's holy destiny. The West's economic warfare against Russia promises impoverishment, now and for as long as Putin clings to power. All that needs to be done now is send an unending stream of pictures over the Internet showing seized yachts and palatial estates that Russian oligarchs have purchased with Russia's stolen wealth. And then let envy and privation do the rest. Paired photos of yachts and villas juxtaposed with destroyed cities, dead Russian soldiers, destroyed armor, and fleeing refugees. Everybody has a smart phone. Putin's crude propaganda is no match against samizdat.
Cutting Russians' purchasing power by 90 percent doesn't destroy cities, but it does remind them of the price they are paying for allowing Putin to act with impunity. Those quarter-million Russians who pulled up stakes and headed elsewhere invariably left family behind. The left-behinds have no reason to hope for any kind of a decent future. Destroying the Russian banks and isolating them from the international banking system means 'no recourse'. No care packages or money remittances.
Top-down revolutions like Valkyrie rarely work. Bottom-up revolution works, but it takes more time. The West's message to the Russian people needs to be that they need to decide whether Putin is worth keeping, and their misery will deepen until they get rid of him. Their world will rot before their eyes. Transportation will revert to what it was under communism. The walls will close in on them. No foreign trade. The drabness that existed in the Post-war years will return. Russians need to know that. They need to find a way to live in our world, and on terms we in the West can live with.
If Putin is taken at his word that he intends to destroy democracy and Western values, we need respond appropriately by attacking his grandiose self-image and his arrogance. He and Trump are two sides of the same coin. Both need to be called to account and punished severely. We were shortsighted in treating Putin as Russia's problem alone; and I want to ensure that we don't make that mistake again.
[LKTIV, please excuse me for stepping off topic for a minute]:
samizdat
learned a fulfilling new word.
thank you, Arthur Silen.
it so very well describes what you have just done here,
and what LKTIV does equally well on his substack.
...and in a very much diminished way what each person who comments on social media does.
Thanks for the latest history lesson, Lucian. My nuclear nightmares have been reignited since Putin made his not so veiled threats a month ago. Our collective memory is sorely lacking, and you have the knack for bringing out the true journalistic gems. I was a teenager when that article came out (I'm sure I read it at the time) and was very familiar with nuclear weapons and delivery systems and "strategy" reading Scientific American and Herman Kahn "Thinking About the Unthinkable" (teenage military history nerd, and peacenik at the same time). How matter of fact they are about millions of lives snuffed out in an instant......as you say the rules of the Big Playground.
Tactical nuclear weapons make previously unthinkable nuclear war, thinkable. Sooner rather than later somebody will use one somewhere. And then the cry will go out, "They nuked us! Roll out Big Bertha, we'll teach 'em a lesson." As these tactical nuclear weapons proliferate the probability of someone using one somewhere approaches 1. I re-watched "Dr. Strangelove" a few weeks ago.
Deeply disturbing, Lucian.
I was reading that MacArthur was within a few hours of using atomic weapons along the Yalu for just such a purpose back in 1950, suggesting that the bombs be salted with cobalt in order to create what he called a "radiation corridor" that would prevent the Chinese from coming back into North Korea. Once that war settled into stalemate, Curtis LeMay proceeded to fire bomb North Korea until not a single building was left standing above the 38th parallel. It took 3 years but it was the same thing as if he dropped atomics on them. Perhaps a casualties were a little lower, but blowing up their dams caused enough starvation to correct that.
Although MacArthur was fired for wanting to prosecute the war into China with the a-bomb, the threat of tactical nuclear weapons was how NATO counterbalanced the overwhelming numerical superiority of Soviet forces for many years. They were the bargaining chip that Kennedy used to get Soviet missiles out of Cuba in 1962, a bunch of obsolete missiles in Turkey pointed straight down the Soviet throat.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. Even Putin as a minor KGB official with no military experience must realize that the reserve forces he would be bringing up are so much worse than the crappy Russian military we've already seen. Nukes are probably looking more attractive, particularly if you see the recent video of how the reserves are handling artillery shells by tossing them out of trucks like they were sandbags
I do think that the idea the United States only has a couple hundred of these things is smoke mirrors, since the military has never been moderate. Eye for an eye gets pretty awful after the second eye since both sides are swinging blind at one another.
On a positive note, I'm going to look for that Hotel California story. It sounds fantastic. You were way ahead of the game since we're seeing so many documentaries about record producers and famous music studios these days.
Thanks again for all your diligent, hard work and excellent reporting. You're setting a great example.
I remember the advent of the neutron bomb. It was billed as a desirable feature to kill the people and spare the buildings.
Our world has descended into madness.
Great retrospective! I'm old enough to remember when "neutron bomb" was a new term to encounter in newspapers and magazines. (And that particular magazine was a valued periodical.)
My recollection was that at the time, the US and NATO was convinced that the Warsaw Pact's alleged superiority in numbers of conventional forces was giving the Commies way too much incentive to attack West Germany and overrun all Europe. And in lightning speed -- and then the Soviets would supposedly defy the West to do anything about it, and accept the fait accompli rather than risk armageddon. (Possibly some of the same feeling motivating Putin today.) So this neutron bomb deus ex machina was going to allow us, the Good Guys, to stop a conventional attack in its tracks without resorting to "dirty" nukes on the battlefield -- we could destroy a Soviet attack and spare the West German cities (more or less). Hurray for the cavalry!
Best of all, these "tactical" low-yield nukes wouldn't NECESSARILY provoke a strategic nuclear response. They would allow outmanned NATO forces to create a stalemate on the conventional battlefield. Such was the theory. So the West got deterrence -- at a fraction of the expense and effort of fielding conventional forces -- while at the same time stopping the escalation process that inevitably led to full-scale nuclear exchange. At least, that's what I remember the sales pitch as being.
Critics pointed out that this might make a NATO/Warsaw Pact clash MORE likely, less likely, because the Commies might just think the West was pussyfooting around with dinky nukes and wouldn't in fact use them, or if they did, it wouldn't be enough to make a difference. Or that reliance on "tactical" nuclear weapons indicated a weakness of resolve. Or that the Warsaw Pact would simply field their OWN neutron bombs. Or that it was immoral to introduce weapons that killed people but left buildings intact. Or something. It was long ago and under much different circumstances, and I haven't tried to research the issue.
An interesting time, tho'. Seems almost quaint now. I also remember having the Simulations Publications, Inc., wargame "NATO" back in the 70s -- a hex-based boardgame based on scenarios for a hypothetical invasion of the NATO border with the Warsaw Pact, the mapboard stretching from Denmark to Austria. The times I played it with my college roommate, the Warsaw Pact armies coming, guns blazing, out of East Germany -- the usual scenario -- always bogged down a short way into West Germany and failed to get out of Czechoslovakia to any degree. Then the ever-increasing NATO armies would start pushing back the enemy. All this without nukes. Optional rules allowed for the introduction of nuclear weapons, but inevitably, these led to full-blown strategic nuclear war, and in the words of the game designers, "simulate this by squirting lighter fluid on the map and lighting a match."
No winners.
BTW, secondhand copies of this game, originals or reprint editions, can still be found on ebay and such collectors' sites. It's a dated game, but instructive. It seems that even then, the sober designers, working from all the best available orders of battle and demonstrated effectiveness they could find, worked out that the Warsaw Pact wasn't the feared all-conquering horde so many in the West feared.
Tactical nuclear weapons are too easy to use because they are viewed as limited and narrowly focused in their destructive power. Yet, an “exchange”
of them by adversaries leads to the same stalemate now seen from the conventional means of warfare in Ukraine. And with a stalemate, one side will be tempted to escalate to break the stalemate. And what is left to do that with? Regular nuclear weapons, the Big Ones.
So starting down the road of using tactical nuclear weapons leaves you with the same result - total and absolute world-wide devastation.
Pleasant thoughts, eh?
Truth, sad but true. Thank you
I don't know how you produce such good and detailed articles with such a short turn around, but I certainly am glad to be a subscriber.
With the news that N. Korea just fired off a missile with a range that would include the western half of this country, I gave up worrying. Two trigger happy "maniacal narcissists" (perfect description btw) makes the odds of survival less every day. I shall be thankful for the time I have left.
oh man
a lot of thought prodding in your posting, LKTIV. thank you.
dunno how, but i had completely forgotten about neutron bombs.
now gotta go google for how small they are now.
When I look at the pictures of the damage in Ukrainian cities, it is difficult to distinguish them from photos of the Hiroshima aftermath. Nukes are more devastating for sure, but the longer this conflict persists, the more the results become the same. Leveled cities and thousands dead.
Once weapons are in an arsenal, it’s a matter of time before a nutcase in power finds a way to deploy them. “Build it, and they will come.”
Well, let’s also consider this: Ukraine is the bread basket for the region. Need I enumerate upon radioactive additives in the food supply?
Russian military leaders read much of what is offered in the west. They must be thinking, "Biden can't lose Ukraine, Ted Cruz will win in 2024, or maybe Trump if he hasn't been indicted." Somewhere, Putin must have listened to someone tell him what might happen. All of this terrible. My fear is Zelenskyy will decide the west will sacrifice either part or all of Ukraine, so he goes to the Israeli's or maybe N. Korea and makes a deal for a small nuke to scare Moscow. This war is not going to end well. I still think the west will betray Ukraine and cut a deal with Putin. Europe and America don't want 20 million refugees or have to pay billions to rebuild Ukraine.
To address some of your concerns -- North Korea is a pariah state with no ties to Ukraine, and why would they want to provoke Russia in this way? Israel has been strangely non-committal about this war, and relies on Russian backing to an odd degree in some arcane ways. They have established a status quo, see-no-evil arrangement in Syria that allows for both party's strategic interests to be protected and preventing accidents between their militaries. No, I don't see Israel getting involved in this at all, the Israelis have nothing to gain.
I agree only so far. This war puts everyone into a strange place. I don't think it will end up with atomic weapons but I think Israel wants to be a player because it helps their economic ambitions with Europe. China or N. Korea might feel the same, do you see the speculative theme in what I'm saying? Do not assume anything.
Whatever happened to the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances entered into on 5 December 1994 to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The memorandum was originally signed by three nuclear powers: the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. China and France gave somewhat weaker individual assurances in separate documents. The memorandum prohibited the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States from threatening or using military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
Doesn't this agreement which quite obviously Russia has violated, obligate the U.S. and UK and possibly France and China to defend Ukraine?
Can neutron bombs be programmed to hit specific DNA?