You Might Want to Know: What’s the difference between “strategic” and “tactical” nuclear weapons?
You Might Want to Know: What’s the difference between “strategic” and “tactical” nuclear weapons?
If you are a war planner, a “strategic” operation is one that sets out to destroy an opponent’s capacity to fight a war. You plan to attack their plants, bases, bridges, railroads, food supply--things like that. In the U.S. in the nineteenth century, killing off the buffalo to starve the Plains Indians was a “strategic” operation, though the term wasn’t used at the time. Trying to bomb the railroads in Germany in World War II was a strategic operation. The term “strategic” was in use by then. It had begun to be used around the time of World War II when heavy bombers entered the picture. Strategic bombing was also sometimes called “precision” bombing, but that was more a wish than an actuality. We learned after World War II that the strategic bombers missed their targets by miles most of the time.
“Tactical” weapons are those used in battles with other soldiers. In a battle with Indians, the rifles used to kill the buffalo could also be used as tactical weapons. Hand grenades are tactical weapons. You’d usually want something bigger than a hand grenade for a strategic operation, though a hand grenade used behind the lines to set a fuel depot on fire could be considered a strategic weapon.
The distinction between “strategic” and “tactical” military operations does seem to be pretty straightforward even if the distinction between strategic and tactical weapons doesn’t.
What about firebombs, incendiary weapons dropped on cities? They obviously can’t be aimed only at enemy soldiers and thus aren’t “tactical” weapons. Are they “strategic”? No, they are not. They are neither “tactical” nor “strategic.”
Early in World War II, the Germans had bombed the British city of Coventry with incendiary as well as conventional bombs. The British then began to bomb German cities with incendiaries. At first we didn’t participate in the firebombing operations but late in World War II, we joined the British in firebombing two German cities, Hamburg and Dresden. In Dresden, a firestorm sprang up that destroyed the city center and killed tens of thousands of whoever happened to be in the city at the time.
When incendiaries are used on a city, the targets are not just the specific military-industrial targets in the cities. The idea of “precision” bombing has here given way to what has been called “area” bombing. The targets are now not industries supporting the war effort but cities and whatever and whomever is in them.
In general, we have thought that in a war civilian non-combatants shouldn’t be deliberately killed. When civilians are killed deliberately, the attack is neither strategic nor tactical. It needs another name. “Terror” could serve. Terrorists don’t agree that civilians should not be targeted in wars. That is what makes them terrorists rather than soldiers.
Not long before Germany surrendered in World War II, our Army Air Force began firebombing cities in Japan. On March 9, 1945, the first low-level firebombing attack on Tokyo ignited a firestorm that burned out sixteen square miles of the central city and killed an estimated one-hundred thousand people, more than either of the atomic bombs we dropped later on Japan.
Our Army Air Force went on to firebomb more than sixty other cities in Japan, and Tokyo again. Some cities were reserved from the firebombing--Hiroshima and Nagasaki among them—so we would be able to see the full effects of the atomic bombs that by that time we were almost sure were coming.
“Strategic” atomic weapons, like firebombs, if dropped on cities, can’t NOT target the civilian noncombatants. That means that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, each of which killed seventy-thousand people right away with more dying later, and the thermonuclear weapons developed later that we came to call “city-busters,” were not “strategic” weapons. They were weapons of “terror.” If our atomic bombs ended World War II, as many believe, they ended it by terror.
President Truman had to decide to drop the Hiroshima bomb. There is some controversy about whether he specifically approved dropping the Nagasaki bomb or whether our military commanders went ahead and did this without getting his approval.
After the war, in a meeting in 1948 with David Lilienthal, commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission, and a few top generals, President Truman said,
You have got to understand that this 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 this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.
It may have been right to drop the atomic bombs. Dropping those bombs may have saved American lives. It may also have saved a great many Japanese lives, lives that otherwise would have been miserably lost in a prolonged siege or an invasion. But these were not “strategic” attacks. Atomic bombs exploded on cities are weapons of terror. It is important to call things by their right names.
Next: Can nuclear weapons be used as “tactical” weapons?