For 77 years, the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) has kept the use of nuclear weapons at bay.
But an increasingly desperate Russia, mired in a disastrous choice war in Ukraine, threatens that status quo. As Russian President Vladimir Putin grows increasingly desperate for a battlefield solution, his press secretary this week declined to rule out Russia using a nuclear weapon if the country faces an existential threat.
One of the many dire possibilities of what could come is the use of “tactical nuclear weapons”.
“TACS” is the common abbreviation for smaller and “smarter” tactical nuclear weapons. Some are even equipped with a “Dial-A-Yield” function, which can control the size of the bomb’s destruction. For some military analysts, this makes the unthinkable prospect of nuclear war almost imaginable.
From the euphemistic verbiage, you might conclude: ‘Tactical nuclear weapons – it can’t be that bad. Maybe it’s just the future of war that we have to adapt to.” Well, think again.
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Once you see the mushroom cloud, “no one will know if it was a 20 kiloton or a 1 megaton (1000 times stronger) weapon,” said Joshua Pollack, editor of the Nonproliferation Review, published by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies†
“They’re more similar than you might expect in terms of their destructiveness,” Pollack told The Daily Beast. “Even this small nuclear bomb is extremely destructive depending on where you drop it. It would be a very large explosion that would generate an electromagnetic pulse, and it would probably start fires.”
Maybe it’s just rhetoric, nuclear blackmail, but when Putin does the unthinkable, Pollack asked, “How do we respond in a way that avoids Armageddon?”
Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, said, “The reason these weapons are called tactical is because they are more likely to be used on the battlefield.”
“The Russians started it,” Korb continued, referring to Russia’s “escalation to de-escalation” doctrine, “and the argument was that if we had them, they would counterbalance the Russians.” Nuclear weapons are meant to keep the enemy guessing, Korb said, and “if… [Putin] goes nuclear, he doesn’t know how we’re going to react.” Would Biden — or the world — accept full-blown nuclear attacks on civilian population centers?
The answer is almost certainly: no. Whatever it’s called at the moment, history will remember it as ‘World War III’.
“The TACs are new, they weren’t there during the Cold War,” Korb added. “We just had the big ones. In theory, the US wouldn’t respond with a big one, but you don’t know that. If Putin launches one with a smaller yield, he doesn’t know if we will respond with a strategic weapon. That’s deterrent. He doesn’t know and we don’t want him to know.”
Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired US military colonel and chief of staff to the late Colin Powell, said the US military — spurred on by a lucrative niche nuclear industry — was “almost simultaneously” modernizing TACs, just like the Russians.
“Each side blamed the other,” he said. The Russians conducted military exercises in 2013-2014 to practice using low-yield nuclear weapons to repel a NATO attack, increasing the likelihood that these weapons would eventually be used.
Wilkerson ridiculed the idea that there is a real difference with a smaller yield TAC. “You see the plume, you don’t know if it’s tactical or strategic,” he said, and a commander will hit back hard instead of waiting for a post-attack assessment.
“We’re back in a time that I thought we’d left behind, that we’d learned our lessons,” Wilkerson continued. “I’ve looked [Putin] for a long time. He is a pragmatic, practical man. I don’t care what kind of beast you think he is… he hasn’t gone mad from master chess what you should be to do this [use nuclear weapons]† But I can’t rule it out, especially as a false flag. It must not come to that.”
Wilkerson argues that nuclear war must be avoided at all costs, acknowledging President Biden for having resisted political pressure to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine’s skies. “If 45 million Ukrainians have to be sacrificed on the altar of no nuclear war, I’m all for it. It’s not worth saving a state if it means blowing up 7 billion people,” he said.
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Joseph Mazur, professor emeritus at Marlboro College, wonders how much the average American knows about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For a piece on “The Madness of Nuclear Threats,” published in Psychology Today’s online blog, Mazur conducted an informal (but telling) investigation.
Mazur questioned 12 adults and four teenagers, none of them experts, about what happened to Hiroshima after the US dropped “the bomb”. They knew broadly what was happening, but had little idea of the magnitude of human suffering and destruction. The adults suspected that the “Little Boy” bomb dropped over Hiroshima killed between 1,000 and 25,000 people. The teenagers estimate 5,000. In reality, the atomic bomb destroyed five square miles of the city and killed between 130,000 and 225,000 people.
“Today, the smallest tactical nuclear weapon is capable of far worse destruction than what happened in Hiroshima,” Mazur wrote. “Even if only one ‘minor’ nuclear weapon were launched in the current conflict, there wouldn’t be enough therapists in the world to address the mental health trauma that would result from watching the aftermath in real time.”
Putin announced last month that he would place Russia’s nuclear forces in “special combat readiness”, sparking an understandable frenzy over what Putin might do to save himself from humiliating military losses. “As far as we can tell, they haven’t moved any systems,” Pollack says. “More people are employed, but more people in command centers shouldn’t be so alarming.”
Pressed on Putin’s intentions, Pollack replied, “I don’t think he’s inclined to… [use TACs] while he is destroying the cities of Ukraine with heavy weapons. TACS proponents say we need to be prepared to deter nuclear war, and I would say, what do we do if the deterrence fails?”
“The Trump administration wanted an additional option in 2018 if the Russians used a small one against us and we wouldn’t respond because we only have the big one. I’m not buying this,” Pollack added. “Nobody will worry about actual kilotons, but everyone in the world would know if a nuclear weapon was used.”
Biden, as a 2019 presidential candidate, was asked about new low-yield nuclear warheads. He replied, “Bad idea,” adding that having these presidents “would be more likely to use them.” That was the correct answer for this time.
There is still hope for an uneasy deterrent and for Putin to wonder about Biden — at least as much as Biden wonders about him.
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