Published on: 10/10/2022 – 18:03
With the growing threat of nuclear weapons being used, be it by Russia or North Korea, the discussion revolves around the use of so-called “tactical” bombs. A family of nuclear weapons portrayed as “less powerful”. At the risk of making the use of weapons of mass destruction more acceptable?
It’s a qualifier that’s emerging more and more to evoke nuclear weapons. North Korea on Monday, September 10, claimed to have conducted a “tactical nuclear” simulation. Russia has repeatedly pointed to its “tactical” nuclear arsenal as a threat to intensify its war in Ukraine. Even Joe Biden, the US President, referred directly to this when he mentioned on Friday the danger of a nuclear “Armageddon” if Moscow used such weapons on the battlefield.
“Until this summer we mostly talked about nuclear weapons without really specifying anything, and then we started using the qualifier ‘tactical’ more and more often,” notes Jean-Marie Collin, expert and spokesman for ‘Ican France’, the hexagonal chapel of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
Weapons usable on the battlefield?
A semantic shift that corresponds above all to a military distinction. Tactical nuclear weapons differ from their strategic ancestors primarily “for physical and technical reasons,” explains Alexandre Vautravers, security and armaments expert and editor-in-chief of the Swiss Military Review (RMS).
Where a nuclear ballistic missile tries to hit hard on all fronts — blast pressure, thermal impact, radiation from radiation, and electromagnetic interference — with the so-called “tactical” weapon “we try to maximize the shock wave and minimize the other effects that may be undesirable when the weapon user’s own troops have planned to cross the beaten zone,” specifies this specialist.
Because of this, they are considered more “mobile” and easier to transport around a battlefield. Not so with strategic missiles, which are housed in silos or embarked on purpose-built submarines and bombers.
There is another way of dividing up the nuclear arsenal, which “depends on the function we give each bomb,” points out Fabian Rene Hoffmann, a nuclear weapons specialist at the University of Oslo’s Oslo Nuclear Project.
In theory, strategic weapons “must be able to be used by states to attack other nations directly to deter them from attacking, while tactical warheads should be able to be used directly on the battlefield to target specific targets,” concludes Jana Baldus, Specialist in questions of nuclear arms control at the Institute for Peace Research in Frankfurt.
Tactical nuclear weapons are presented as more precise and limited in their effect: “The explosion takes place at a very low altitude or close to the ground; the aim is to destroy an infrastructure or a precise target, and the impact can be limited to a radius ranging from a few hundred meters to a few kilometers”, specifies Alexandre Vautravers.
From an operational perspective, it is the last resort on the battlefield when an army is faced with a threat that conventional weapons cannot effectively avert, or when aiming at a target too large for simple missiles. As such, it could be used to destroy a column of tanks approaching the front lines or to attack a major military airfield.
The temptation to trivialize nuclear weapons
But these are theoretical differences. In fact, no atomic bomb of any kind has been used in a conflict since the end of World War II. And “the boundary between the two categories remains very artificial. The United States and Russia have discussed what is ‘tactical’ or ‘strategic’ on many occasions without really being able to agree,” stresses Jana Baldus.
This vagueness is found even in official NATO documents. For example, their summary of the “Definition of Nuclear Forces” demonstrates the large gap between the French vision of strategic nuclear weapons – whose “definition is based on nuclear deterrent doctrine rather than technical specifications – and the Russian one, which fills almost an entire page of specifications.
In fact, the increasingly frequent use of the addition “tactical” is a response to “a very political motive for making nuclear weapons ‘usable’ in the context of a conflict,” confirms Fabian Rene Hoffmann. This term “leads to an unconscious bias in the population: There is one form of nuclear weapon that would be more acceptable than the other because its use would be limited to military purposes,” adds Jana Baldus.
A very dangerous slope for Jean-Marie Collin because it tends to make people forget that all nuclear bombs – tactical or strategic – are “weapons of mass destruction”. So “there’s a good chance that the American bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki are now considered tactical weapons,” notes Jana Baldus.
In addition, the most formidable “American conventional bombs – nicknamed the Moab (for “Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb” – or bomb with a massive explosion effect) – have a destructive power equivalent to 11 tons of TNT, while being the weakest of the so-called Russian ‘tactical ‘ Nuclear weapons have an energy equivalent to 300 tons of TNT,” summarizes Jean-Marie Collin.
This Russian semantic obsession with “tactical” nuclear power also risks reigniting an arms race. Currently, France has only strategic nuclear weapons, while the United States has abandoned its tactical arsenal in favor of conventional weapons.
But if Moscow threatens that such a tactical weapon will be used on the battlefield, it could push other nuclear powers to acquire it. And the more weapons of this type – presented as less devastating – are in circulation, the greater the risk that they will one day be used.