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October 10, 2022

To put it simply, in the current standoff over Ukraine’s territory, Putin has the advantage as far as nuclear threats go. The ongoing brinkmanship there has revealed a serious misunderstanding on the part of some analysts and most of the media attempting to define the threats made by Biden and Putin, by relating it to the Cold war environment.

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The problem is that in the realm of deterrence the US no longer has a robust nuclear response at the very low end of the weapons spectrum whereas Russia does (if their maintenance is up to par).  Let’s review an ignored aspect of the rush to drawdown US forces in the 90s.

Important sidenote: In the wake of the government raid on Mar-a-Lago and the DoJ’s assertion that “nuclear documents” were found, I must instead thank Obama for providing some of the numbers I’m using in this article.  But I am being sarcastic in doing so, because generations of Americans and our allies sacrificed deeply to determine Russia’s and China’s comparable numbers, and to protect the information that Obama provided to all, an act of near-treason.

On top of this, Israel’s policy of ambiguity concerning its nuclear weaponry was flushed down the toilet by Obama, a pathetic move just to make a deal with Iran.

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The US’s ground-based tactical nuclear capability was retired in the early 90s following the collapse of the Soviet Union.  This, in essence, removed any means of preventing nuclear escalation beyond an operational theater.  Rather than destroying cities, the tactical nuclear weapons no longer in our arsenal were designed for use against large Soviet combat formations on the march to confront NATO forces. These tactical nukes had 0.007 of the yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. 

Those who assume that Biden’s response to Russia’s potential use of nukes must entail using our own nukes must either be ignorant or have a death wish.  This is because our only recourse would be to use high yield warheads resulting in destruction on a global scale.

Our inventory and that of the USSR included weapons fired by tube artillery, rockets and theater ballistic missiles.  For example, the 155mm Artillery Fired Atomic Projectile was rated at 0.072 kilotons (kt), but according to Jane’s it was closer to 0.1 kt, which is equivalent to 100 tons of TNT. 

For comparison purposes, the Pepcon rocket fuel explosion in Henderson, Nevada was rated at 0.3 kt; that is, three times as much as a 155mm AFAP.  Depending on the situation, it would likely would have required a “package” of these weapons to adequately slow or stop a Warsaw Pact breakthrough operation.

The 155mm AFAP in use 1963-1992 (Los Alamos National Laboratory, public domain)

Next up in yield was the US Lance battlefield rocket, which ultimately had a yield of 1 kt. And finally, the Pershing II theater ballistic missile which had a “dial-a-yield” of 5 – 80 kt.  Despite advances in warhead technology, we foresaw the problems of large yield weapons in preventing escalation outside the war zone and ensured later versions of both the Lance and Pershing warheads were reduced in yield, not increased.

The US, being the good guys, saw getting rid of the tactical level nuclear weapons as a peace dividend.  However, there was also the realization that precision strike weapons employed at critical points could replace or supplement the low-yield weapons without all the infrastructure, training and exercises.  Ask any old artilleryman about nuclear surety inspections where one minor infraction could be a career killer.  They would say precision guided conventional munitions is the way to go, thank you very much.