Tactical nuclear weapons: another firebreak

M V Ramana

The Daily Times
Thursday, June 6, 2002

A May 28 report in a Pakistani newspaper suggests Pakistan and India have deployed tactical nuclear warheads along the border. This would be alarming, if true. But since there have been no corroborating reports — and on something like this, one can be fairly confident that there would be — this report must be considered doubtful. However, even contemplating the deployment of nuclear warheads along the border, presumably for use in the battlefield, is dangerous and heightens tensions in an already stressful situation.

The idea of tactical nuclear weapons arose in the context of the cold war. Roughly speaking, strategic nuclear warheads were supposed to be those that were mounted on long-range bombers or intercontinental ballistic missiles, were more powerful in their yield, and were intended to attack the “enemy’s” population centers or nuclear arsenals. Tactical nuclear warheads were supposedly smaller in yield and shorter in range, and meant for use on the battlefield.

These definitions are not very precise and are ambiguous to start with. However, in the South Asian context they make even less sense. Unlike the US and Russia which were separated by thousands of miles, the distinction between long range and short range is not particularly meaningful in the case of countries like India and Pakistan which share a long border. And given the relatively few explosive nuclear tests that India and Pakistan have conducted, it is not clear if they have the ability to reliably design a weapon with a very low yield. Nevertheless, Indian and Pakistani strategists have bandied about these terms; some have suggested deploying them for fighting on the battlefield or blocking mountain passes between China and India.

Tactical nuclear weapons, particularly those of the US and its NATO allies, were intended to be used in the early stages of a war with the Warsaw Pact forces. Both NATO and the Soviet Union deployed thousands of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. The idea put forward by American strategists was that tactical nuclear weapons provide flexibility in responding to Soviet attacks. It was suggested that such small yield nuclear weapons be used to stop large scale conventional attacks, attacking artillery and missiles, and so on.

Advocating tactical nuclear weapons was an effort to make nuclear weapons more useable, an attempt to think about these new and devastating weapons in the same way as militaries have thought about conventional weapons. Thus, in December 1953, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff observed that “Today atomic weapons have virtually achieved a conventional status within our armed forces.” As just another weapon, it could be used without any qualms.

These qualms arose not just from the sheer destructiveness of nuclear weapons, but also the fact that they release radioactivity. Ever since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the notion of exposing people to radioactivity has held widespread dread and horror — and rightly so. Public perceptions of nuclear weapons were conditioned by this fear.
It is to counter this perception that following the atomic attacks that the US military and government undertook a massive public relations exercise. Nowhere in the initial announcements about the explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were radiation effects mentioned. General Groves, who oversaw the Manhattan Project that designed and manufactured the weapons used, ordered a team of doctors and scientists to the two bombed cities whose “mission was to prove that there was no radioactivity from the bomb.” Though the team did find some radioactivity, they decided that it was “below the hazardous limit.” A New York Times headline on 13 September 1945 highlighted this conclusion: ‘No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin.’ In actual fact, about 20% of the deaths in Hiroshima resulted from radiation related illnesses.

There have been subsequent attempts to downplay the radioactive dangers that are the inevitable consequence of nuclear explosions. Recently the weapons laboratories in the United States, with the support of the administration, have been proposing the development of an improved “bunker buster” bomb to target underground command centers. The claim is that these bunker busters have such a small yield that they would destroy the target without exposing nearby civilian populations to radioactive fallout.

But, as physicist Rob Nelson has showed, the use of these weapons would blanket an area of several square kilometers with radioactive fallout. Nevertheless, design and manufacture of such a weapon may proceed given the powerful lobbying capabilities of the weapons laboratories in the US. Such designs and, what’s more important, making plans for their use offer an insight into the bizarre world of nuclear war planners and their lack of any sense of reality.

The development of bunker busters is part of the latest push by the US to make nuclear weapons more useable, especially in attacks on third world nations. The recent Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) has also tried to achieve the same end (See The Friday Times, 5-11 April 2002). Apart from inventing various scenarios that are postulated to require the use of nuclear weapons, the new NPR also talks about a new strategic triad, whose offensive leg is comprised of both nuclear and conventional weapons. All these tend to blur the distinction between nuclear weapons and conventional weapons.

Such efforts to utilize nuclear weapons on the battlefield or in other roles are profoundly dangerous. Even if these have relatively small explosive yields, their effects would still be horrendous. Worse still, their use would almost inevitably lead to the use of larger and more destructive weapons in retaliation. With India and Pakistan being involved in a low-intensity hot war and geographically adjacent to each other, adopting ideas about how to deploy or use nuclear weapons — especially tactical weapons — from the cold war rivals would be suicidal.

M V Ramana is a physicist and research staff member at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. He is the author of “Bombing Bombay? Effects of Nuclear Weapons and a Case Study of a Hypothetical Explosion” (Cambridge, USA: International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, 1999). Some of
his writings can be found at http://www.geocities.com/m_v_ramana/nuclear.html

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