Presidential Predicaments: Eisenhower II (of VII)--Going Tactical
In the 1950’s we began to add to our nuclear stockpile new smaller “tactical” nuclear weapons that had been developed at our Los Alamos National Laboratory. Some had been tested not long before in Operation Teapot at the test site we had opened inside our own country in 1951 outside Las Vegas.
“Tactical” nuclear bombs yielded much less than the “strategic” bombs did. Sometimes only the equivalent ten-thousand tons of TNT. Which was still more than ten-thousand times what any of the conventional strategic weapons employed by our air forces in World War II had yielded.
These “tactical” weapons might, just might, have a use you could consider “purely military.” That is, it might be possible to confine their effects to military targets. There was some doubt about that. But we could hope. That’s what calling them “tactical,” was. A hope.
President Eisenhower sent loads of these tactical weapons over to our soldiers in Western Europe to have in the field in case the Soviet Communists came pouring across the border, the way the Chinese Communists had done in Korea. When the Chinese invaded, we didn’t have tactical nuclear weapons yet. Would we have used them if we had? Hard to tell. If we had used them, would there be peace and unity on the Korean peninsula now? Even harder to tell.
The National Security Council 162/2 policy statement that established President Eisenhower’s “New Look” policy had said that “in the event of hostilities,” the United States "will consider nuclear weapons as available for use as other munitions." That meant that Eisenhower and his advisors, at least, believed that nuclear weapons could be military weapons, like those “other munitions” that Eisenhower knew about from his experience in World War II.
This was a big change from what President Truman had said about nuclear weapons, even before we had developed the “strategic” hydrogen bombs. In a meeting with the Atomic Energy Commission in July 1948, he’d said “You have got to understand that this [atomic bomb] isn’t a military weapon…. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people and not for military uses. So we have got to treat it differently from rifles, and cannons and ordinary things like that.”
The Hiroshima bomb had been considered a “strategic” weapon at the time it was used. Something with the same yield would now be called “tactical.”
Were these words losing their meaning?
No one seemed to be concerned about this at the moment.
Next: Presidential Predicaments: Eisenhower III (of VII)—Transfer of Custody to the Military