Are They Useless? VI (of XV). Are They Usable Yet?
General then President Eisenhower had never seen and never would see a nuclear weapon explode. But in 1953, he declared that our armed forces would be treating nuclear weapons as “conventional.” Did he really think our “tactical” nuclear weapons could be used as conventional tactical weapons? That they could have a “military use”?
General Colin Powell, who some years later had been in command of the “tactical” nuclear weapons we had in Europe, in the end didn’t think they could. Powell is who started us on this investigation with his declaration in a 2010 documentary that nuclear weapons “are useless, they cannot be used.”
In World War II, our biggest conventional bombs were the ones we used for attacks of a kind—called “strategic”—that had been invented in World War II. In these “strategic” attacks, we would aim to destroy arms factories, storage depots, oil refineries, railroads—the kinds of things we thought gave our enemies their “war-fighting ability.” The strategic bombs we used most often were 500- and 750-pound bombs. That’s pounds, not tons. And those pounds were the weight of the “iron bombs,” not of the explosives they contained, which would of course be less.
Since that time, we have designed and built conventional bombs that yield a good bit more than those World War II bombs did. The biggest so far is one we called MOAB, the Mother of All Bombs.
The MOAB itself weighed 11 tons, a little more than the Nagasaki bomb had weighed. MOAB yielded, let’s say, the equivalent of 9 or 10 tons of TNT—at least 24 times more than the 750-pound strategic bomb we used in World War II. But even 10 tons is more than 2000 times less than the TNT equivalent of what the Nagasaki bomb had yielded.
MOAB was dropped in 2017 on an Isis stronghold we’d found in Afghanistan. I don’t think we in the public learned what difference it made. In any case, that war didn’t turn out well for us. Or for those Afghans who supported us.
During the Eisenhower years, we deployed nuclear weapons we called “tactical” that had yields more than four times greater than did the Hiroshima bomb. By the end of the 1950’s, we had developed nuclear bombs with yields in the megaton range—at least 70 Hiroshimas—that were light enough to be carried by our F-100 “tactical” jet fighter airplanes. The fact that the bombs could be carried by our fighter airplanes made these bombs, the President and our military seem to have decided, “tactical weapons,” never mind that they had yields tens of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.
But Ted Taylor did help us design “tactical” bombs that were much smaller in yield than the Hiroshima bomb. The W54, the smallest “tactical” nuclear bomb we ever tested, had a diameter of only eleven or so inches and could weigh as little as sixty pounds. Its yield was “variable,” meaning “adjustable.” The lowest yield I’ve seen cited for it is the equivalent of 10 tons, that is, 20,000 pounds, of TNT, about the yield of the Mother of All Bombs that we had used as a strategic bomb in Afghanistan in 2017.
MOAB itself was considered, as I said, “strategic.” The W54 has always been called a “tactical” weapon.
Ten tons is, however, just the lowest yield that the W54 can be set to. The yield can be set, it is reported, at up to 1000 tons--a hundred times the yield of the MOAB. At that yield, would it still qualify in our eyes as a “tactical” weapon?
In any case, versions of the W54 were designed for different“tactical” uses—in an air-to-air missile that could destroy a large formation of bombers if you could find a large formation of bombers any more; in an atomic demolition weapon that could collapse a mountain pass or dig out a big hole that Soviet tanks might not be able to negotiate; or as a depth charge that would crush any submarines in a wide area of the ocean; or in a projectile that could be fired at a large mass of advancing troops using a howitzer that we hoped would get it far enough away from the soldiers who fired it for them not to get hurt too. Later, the W54 was re-designed so it could be used in a guided bomb called the “Walleye.”
It was never used for any of these purposes.
During his administration, President Eisenhower sent many hundreds of “tactical” nuclear weapons over to Europe with our forces, in the countries that gave us permission to put them there, that is. Sometimes the people in the countries whose leaders had allowed us to bring them in protested. The protests got violent sometimes. U.S. “quick reaction” troops had to be trained and assigned to protect our tactical nuclear weapons, not from the Soviets who were our enemies, but from the locals in the countries we were protecting. That’s gratitude for you.
Our “tactical” nuclear weapons were kept in Europe until after the end of the Cold War. None was ever used. When the weapons were brought back to the United States, almost all were decommissioned. Maybe all, hard to know for sure.
In Europe and Turkey and a few other places—South Korea maybe, maybe not—we still today have stationed some nuclear weapons that are called “tactical.” The “tactical” weapon I’m talking about here is the B-61 bomb. Designed at Los Alamos, it is a highly adaptable thermonuclear weapon that came into service in 1968, the year I graduated from New York University law school.
The B-61 weighs only about 700 pounds, less than the conventional 750-pound iron bombs that were used in World War II. The B-61’s case is streamlined, which allows it to be carried outside a tactical fighter as well as inside a bomber. It weighs more than ten times less than the Hiroshima bomb. It has a “variable yield.” Some models have a yield of only .3 kilotons (that’s 300 tons, 33 times the yield of the MOAB), others a yield of 340 kilotons, more than 34,000 times the yield of the MOAB, with several settings available in between.
So when it comes to the project of designing weapons with a small enough bang to be used as “tactical” nuclear weapons, where are we?
When it comes to nuclear weapons, the terms “tactical” and “strategic” seem to have lost their meaning. “Strategic” just means “big.” Big beyond imagining. Big beyond any use that could be considered military. “Tactical” just means not as big as our biggest but much bigger than any conventional strategic weapon we have ever had.
Our military strategists have recently come to think, we’ve heard, that our “strategic” nuclear weapons have yields so massive that it is not believable that we would use them. When former President Trump was briefed on our nuclear weapons, he reportedly asked something like, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” Good question. Should we also ask, “If we can’t use them, why do we have them?”
A later directive from the Trump administration ordered the development of nuclear weapons with yields small enough to make it at least look like we would use them.
This is not a new idea, as you now know if you didn’t before.
Does “tactical” now mean, then, “small enough to make adversaries think we might actually use the weapon”? Just how small would the yield have to be to meet this standard—the standard of “seeming to be something we would use”? We have not been told what the standard is. Any such standard could in any case be only a guess, right? Besides which, the value could vary from moment to moment and situation to situation.
The 300-ton setting of the B61, which we still have deployed in Europe and elsewhere, must have been thought too big. How about the 10-ton setting of Ted Taylor’s W54, which was about the yield of the Mother of All Bombs? Would that be small enough to make it seem to be something we would use as we had used the MOAB in Afghanistan?
When it comes to nuclear weapons, size might not matter. Any use of a B61, even at its lowest setting of 300 tons, or the W54 at its lowest setting of 10 tons, would be the use of a nuclear weapon.
The problem that we cannot design ourselves out of is that any use of a nuclear weapon opens the door to the use of any nuclear weapon.
How is that door, once opened, to be closed?
Next: Are They Useless? VII (of X): What Is Yielded Besides the Bang?