What is?
Regular nuclear warheads were created to give military commanders more flexibility on the battlefield. In the mid-1950s, as more powerful thermonuclear bombs were made and tested, military designers thought that smaller weapons with shorter range would be more useful in “tactical” or military situations. Modern warheads have a variable “dial-up” performance, which means that a pilot can determine its explosive power and a regular weapon will have power anywhere from a fraction of a kilotone up to 50 kt. For a sense of scale, the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima was about 15 carats. One kiloton equals one thousand tons of TNT, a powerful explosive. Regular weapons were intended to be used against troop concentrations, ships, shipyards, airports, etc. Only the Czechoslovak army had plans to use 131 nuclear weapons against NATO targets as part of its initial offensive. Other members of the Warsaw Pact and NATO had their own plans for nuclear use. Any such exchange would have left much of central Europe immediately uninhabited, with concerns that regular nuclear use would escalate rapidly to strategic nuclear use with most of the United States, the Soviet Union, France and the United Kingdom destroyed in space. of an afternoon.
Why should Russia use them?
With the stakes so high, why take that risk? Russia did badly in this war, the myth of its new professional armed forces is torn apart, the country’s international prestige is at the bottom. Ineffective, incompetent and clumsily brutal, the Russian army has another chance to reverse its misfortunes on the battlefield as a new wave of reinforcements, killed from abroad, begins to make itself felt. If Putin can not emerge from this war with what looks like a victory, or if there is a case where Russian troops seem to be generally defeated, the chances of Russia using nuclear energy to support its status as a world power begin to rise. .
All nuclear tactics are “strategic”
Most of the calculations about how the US and Russia would react to the use of nuclear weapons have their origins in the Cold War and the delicate “Balance of Terror” that kept the world safe but fearful. The use of nuclear weapons was a taboo that had not been broken by the Nagasaki bombing in the last days of World War II. During the Cold War that followed, the seamless integration of nuclear weapons into every level of military planning, and their use, by both sides led to the use of a single weapon in a global nuclear conflict in which the destruction of all was “Mutually secured”. . One thing nuclear weapons had to do was prevent one another from the possibility of large-scale invasions of Europe, the epicenter of the post-World War II Cold War conflict. NATO and Warsaw Pact forces have maintained a steady state of readiness in the event of hostilities. This did not prevent the Warsaw Pact from crushing uprisings in its own sphere of influence, in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, there were no major wars between the two blocs and a restless peace was maintained. But with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact at the end of the Cold War, NATO expanded eastward to absorb most of the countries of the former Warsaw Pact. The implementation of significant conditions for the reduction of nuclear weapons has successfully reduced the nuclear reserves of the United States and Russia. Both now have only a fraction of the nuclear weapons they once had. The ideas and doctrine of nuclear deterrence atrophied as the dangers of Armageddon receded. Budget defense funds were diverted to the thorny problems of occupation and counter-insurgency and to the so-called “World War on Terror”. The doctrine is useful, as are the detailed plans, but in the worst nuclear crisis, when in 1962, the United States faced Soviet nuclear weapons just off its coast in Cuba, all these plans were abandoned, as they all led to one thing – global extinction. On the contrary, in this nuclear poker game with the whole planet at stake, intense negotiations, political backchannels, last-minute private assurances and a bluff between the two superpowers have won the day. This dialogue ignored military thinking, focusing instead on the dynamics between US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev and their groups. But in 2022, two very different people are in charge, US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The questions are simple: Would Putin break the nuclear taboo using these weapons in anger for the first time in 77 years? And if so, how would President Biden respond? So if Russia fired just one nuclear weapon, say, over a military target, would the United States risk escalating the scale of retaliation, with global catastrophe waiting at the top? President Biden recently signed a memorandum authorizing the use of US nuclear weapons in retaliation for a chemical or nuclear attack. However, Ukraine is not a member of NATO, so Biden would respond with his kind to protect Ukraine, while running the extreme risk of destroying a country that has already been destroyed by war. One of the ironies of nuclear weapons, which was not lost on the Ukrainian people, is that not only did they not prevent Russia from invading Ukraine, but the possible use of nuclear weapons actually prevented NATO from helping Ukraine. Russia has stepped up its stance on the nuclear alert, a worrying but not uncommon act in times of war. However, Russia has in the past reported the use of nuclear weapons. In 2015, it threatened to target Denmark, from all countries, if it joined NATO’s missile shield. With the war going so badly in Ukraine, the scenarios that President Putin could claim to be victorious or successful for Russia are rapidly diminishing, and Putin’s political survival is increasingly linked to the outcome of the conflict. Weak leaders – with a strong sense of survival, their failing armed forces and the country’s prestige at the bottom – may well be tempted to remind the world that if they did not win this conflict, no one would win the next one and that Russia may be down but it is not out.
