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.
Much more likely, that would be seen as retaliating in kind.
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.
Except the US is supposed to have destroyed its chemical and biological weapons stockpiles decades earlier.
what about a nuke tipped ASM that takes out 3 or so destroyer /frigate sized warships ? while they are at searecall, 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
what about a nuke tipped ASM that takes out 3 or so destroyer /frigate sized warships ? while they are at sea
which nations had nuke tipped SAMs ? USSR did ?
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.
what about a nuke tipped ASM that takes out 3 or so destroyer /frigate sized warships ? while they are at sea
which nations had nuke tipped SAMs ? USSR did ?
https://books.google.com/books?id=3...DCgYQ6AEIETAB#v=onepage&q=AAW NUCLEAR&f=falsePretty rare for a TF to have DDs that close together, other than at harbor to where a single nuke could get that many
USN Terrier and Talos had nuclear warheads as well as HE, and the Army had Nike-Hercules, also had ground attack mode in W.Germany and South Korea for its nuclear warhead
Soviets had the Shaddock cruise missile with a 350kt warhead, and as the USSR started to crumble they were replacing those with the Sandbox cruise missile, faster with same size warhead
The Sunburn was faster yet, but 'only' 120kt warhead
It seems they tested them, but didn't deploy any.Did the Soviets also have the "neutron bomb" by the early 80s ?
were there any 1 KT weapons before 1990 ?So maybe 1 kt-range battlefield tacnukes are less likely to cause escalation. They’re devastating in built up areas, but in natural terrain the area denial, morale-reducing and C3I-disrupting effects might’ve been greater than the actual destruction of troops and vehicles.
Well, actually Israel planned to use nukes during the Yok Kippur War if its counteroffensive had failed.
were there any 1 KT weapons before 1990 ?
But the Nerve gas was pulled out of theater, fast, like all the Nerve gas was gone from Japan and Okinawa by 1971 from Operation Red Hat
and the later Steel Box, where artillery shells and missiles were removed, after RR promised the W.Germans the Nerve Gas would be gone by 1990. The MLRS that replaced Lance, never had a deployed binary chemical warhead, that didn't have one either.
Carter didn't fund the Binary BIGEYE Binary bomb. Reagan wanted to, but the Senate killed it.
It was to have replaced the WETEYE sarin bomb, that were emptied in 1977.
The cases remained in Colorado, though during the GulfWar,some thought was given to filling them with firefighting chemicals to help with the oilfires in Kuwait.
The M43 cluster Bomb, they were all destroyed by 1989. The M139 Bomblet for the Pershing, were all destroyed by 1976
The M34 cluster bomb had the M125 Sarin filled bomblets were destroyed in Colorado in 1976
By 1990, the MC-1 Sarin bomb, were at Johnston Atoll and a Depot in Oregon, awaiting incineration. These would be the only possible bombs that might have been redeployed.
By the Gulf War, the US just didn't have chemical weapons that were ready for fast deployment.
That's why by the '70s, the US made clear that Chem or Bio attacks would be replied to with Nukes, that were still very plentiful, even after the Wall came down
I wonder what the status of the weapons at the Newport Indiana arsenal were? Actual destruction of the agents there was delayed until after 2000.
The W54 (as the B54) was also used in the SADM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54#VariantsThe AAM version of that W54 warhead was set for around 1kt
Something like 42 kg of highly enriched (ie, weapons grade) uranium were given away by Argentina to the USA in 2012 and considering Alfonsin (ruled 1983-1989) ended the Argentine nuclear weapons program, I think it's same to assume that's the amount of weapons grade uranium the Argentine last dictatorship managed to accumulate. As in, not enough to build a single bomb.