Limited use of tactical nuclear weapons

Khanzeer

Banned
Is there a possible scenario during the cold war in which nuclear armed states can use tactical nuclear weapons and/ or naval nuclear weapons against certain military targets [ naval vessels, air bases etc] and it does NOT escalate into using strategic nuclear weapons by superpowers?
Not talking about wp vs NATO or usa vs USSR or
But something like e.g
India vs pak
South africa nuke Angola
Israel nuke egypt
USSR vs japan
Etc
As doomsday scenarios always claim one use of tactical nuke and it will always end in nuclear armageddon
 
Not really the cold war, but IIRC the US had nuclear weapons on the table if Sadam used gas in 91

I think they would have been taken off quickly. The US Army can handle poison gas better than we could handle the diplomatic fallout from dropping nukes. Frankly poison gas would have hindered his troops more than ours.
 
Wouldn't using tactical nukes, even in limited circumstances make Nuclear Weapons less taboo and increasing the possibly that a strategic weapon is used in a future conflict?
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
Wouldn't using tactical nukes, even in limited circumstances make Nuclear Weapons less taboo and increasing the possibly that a strategic weapon is used in a future conflict?
Yes. If nuclear weapons had been used in Korea, using nuclear weapons would be considered an ordinary part of war.
 
Wouldn't using tactical nukes, even in limited circumstances make Nuclear Weapons less taboo and increasing the possibly that a strategic weapon is used in a future conflict?
recall, a 'tactical' sized device destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The joke heard in West Gwermany while I was there, was that the villages were spaced two kilotons apart.

that said, about the only nukes that could be banged off without immediately getting WWIII going would be nuke tipped SAMs and AAMs
 

FBKampfer

Banned
I think they would have been taken off quickly. The US Army can handle poison gas better than we could handle the diplomatic fallout from dropping nukes. Frankly poison gas would have hindered his troops more than ours.


Maybe. I don't disagree that gas would hinder them more than us, but say the 82nd's LZ's caught a dose of Sarin, there'd probably be a decent number of casualties.

And the US was in the beginning of its "shock and awe" phase, and if HW had won reelection, I'd give maybe 1 in 3 chance the launch site gets some instant sunshine.
 
Maybe. I don't disagree that gas would hinder them more than us, but say the 82nd's LZ's caught a dose of Sarin, there'd probably be a decent number of casualties.

And the US was in the beginning of its "shock and awe" phase, and if HW had won reelection, I'd give maybe 1 in 3 chance the launch site gets some instant sunshine.

Much smaller than that HW had a handle on international relations. Sarin gas or no using nukes would have been a diplomatic disaster. We have a lot of chemical warfare gear to help handle it. More indiscriminate bombing yes, nukes no.
 
I think you could probably see nuclear depth charges and nuclear tipped interceptor missiles used without necessarily provoking a nuclear response. More specifically, I think that in those applications the fact that the weapon used was nuclear doesn't inherently escalate the situation any more than using conventional weapons - it just increases the likelihood of destroying an enemy asset and killing enemy personnel. The real danger is that two nuclear armed powers are in a position where they're dropping depth charges and intercepting missiles in the first place.

Personally, I think it is important that both of those applications are somewhat "peripheral" in that while using nuclear weapons is more effective, it isn't an absolute game changer in the way that other strategic and tactical weapons are. A nuclear depth charge gives you the near certainty of destroying the submarine in question, and a nuclear interceptor gives you better odds of taking down the missiles you're trying to intercept but neither is on the same level as destroying an entire city or army with a single bomb. It's also worth noting that both of those are applications were nuclear weapons have been phased out and replaced with guided munitions because they offer similar benefits in terms of a greater likelihood of destroying the target. Basically, applications where the action itself wouldn't initiate WWIII are the ones where using nuclear weapons wouldn't do the same.


For potential scenarios, maybe an India-Pakistan dust up or something between North Korea and the South/Japan/US where one of the parties uses a nuke without escalating the conflict. But I can't see anything between the major nuclear states that doesn't escalate.
 
Much smaller than that HW had a handle on international relations. Sarin gas or no using nukes would have been a diplomatic disaster. We have a lot of chemical warfare gear to help handle it. More indiscriminate bombing yes, nukes no.

In 91, the US could have slimed Iraqi airfields & barracks with its own chemical weapons arsenal, which it retained the right to use in a retaliatory capacity.
 
In 91, the US could have slimed Iraqi airfields & barracks with its own chemical weapons arsenal, which it retained the right to use in a retaliatory capacity.

the US Chemical Corps was disestablished on January 11, 1973, and weapons put into storage, with destruction started in 1990

The only 'chemical' retaliation possible was with smoke and napalm, everything else has being burned up in Utah and Johnston Atoll, as well as a few other sites. There was no training, no units, nothing deployed to do anything with Mustard or nerve gasses in 1991
 
the US Chemical Corps was disestablished on January 11, 1973, and weapons put into storage, with destruction started in 1990

The only 'chemical' retaliation possible was with smoke and napalm, everything else has being burned up in Utah and Johnston Atoll, as well as a few other sites. There was no training, no units, nothing deployed to do anything with Mustard or nerve gasses in 1991

Bush did not renounce the US' right to retaliate with chemical weapons until May of 1991, after Desert Storm had wrapped up. While the destruction of the US chemical weapons arsenal began two years earlier, it hasn't even been completed today. Plenty of VX & Sarin remained available, as did the munitions nescessary to deploy them by air. Not sure about on the ground though. The CWC wasn't ratified until 1993 regardless.
 
I think they would have been taken off quickly. The US Army can handle poison gas better than we could handle the diplomatic fallout from dropping nukes. Frankly poison gas would have hindered his troops more than ours.
I'm not so sure about that. It's long been NATO policy that a germ is a gas is a nuke and they're all to be responded to the same way.
 
For what its worth; a article in the US Naval Institute Proceedings appeared a year or two ago, describing the hypothetical use of nukes in current Russian military exercises. The large scale army or army group exercises each ended with the use of nuclear weapons, after a build up of operations to a decisive point. I see a contrast here in that pre 1990 Soviet Red Army exercises started with the use of nuclear weapons and operations continued with the assumed use of tactical and strategic weapons tapering off as they or the delivery systems were expended.
 
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