Targeting criteria for tactical nukes.

Can anyone enlighten me, either by links or by a process of deduction, the process by which targets for these weapons were decided? Obviously any nation considering building them was going to need to think about how many it would build, how it was going to divide its fissile material between these and strategic nukes, and involves the important discussion of exactly what is the dividing line between the two.


What seems clear to me right now is that it's largely going to encompass high-value, mobile targets of opportunity and the means of transporting and resupplying them, e.g. divisional or corps-size formations of Warsaw Pact armour, battle-groups at sea, enemy ballistic missile submarines (whichever side you're on), US carrier battle groups (if you're the Warsaw Pact and have no carriers), large convoys, supply dumps, field tank/artillery parks and the like.


The assured single-pass destruction of absolutely non-mobile targets (e.g. railway marshalling yards, major road and rail bridges, dockyards from which fleets have already sailed or in which they are not at anchor) seems more to fit into a strategic criterion, while there are others with which there might be overlap, e.g. the nuclear obliteration of a dockyard at which a reinforced armoured division has just arrived and is being unshipped. Looking at what happened to Halifax during the First World War (the explosion of an ammo ship in the harbour with the extensive destruction which resulted), you wouldn't need even a Hiroshima-sized nuke to upset a lot of applecarts and keep that formation out of the fight.


Of course all this assumes that the widespread use of tac nukes on BOTH sides doesn't erupt into a massive strategic explosion of rage and revenge. The safest place to use them if you want to avoid that seems to be at sea, over the horizon from any land mass, where nobody's home soil is getting blasted and only "legitimate" targets are being destroyed.


I think the designers of the 1980's computer game "Theatre Europe" had a good approach. They said they couldn't NOT address the issue of nuclear weapon availability, but didn't want the game to degenerate into an exercise in what they called "nuclear ping pong". You quickly learned the number of nuclear releases you were allowed (I think it was two) before the subsequent shot would bring a massive spasm launch that lost you the game and exterminated humanity.

I have heard ISIS and tactical nukes used in the same sentence. Stay tuned

VH said:

I have heard ISIS and tactical nukes used in the same sentence. Stay tuned

Click to expand...

Until the sentence you just wrote I definitely hadn't, care to share? I certainly can't think of a scenario where that's even remotely plausible but then me being wrong about something is entirely plausible.

As for nuke targeting it's one of the most classified pieces of information around although there is plenty of talking about in generalities pin the subject, particularly from cold warriors.

The SIOP often calls for multiple warheads on a single target to ensure destruction but tactical nukes by their vary nature are flexible in a way that would make it hard to say this is delicately targeted by that.

I'm certain that there have been studies done into which weapons on what platforms would be ideal for use against likely targets (think underground Iranian and DPRK nuclear facilities) but beyond that and their role in outright nuclear war I don't think there is much direct thought about how many are needed.

This will become more and more relevant as stockpiles decrease but for Russia and the USA they have way more than they need the moment, most weapons are recycled updated weapons from a time when they simply built as many as they could and they keep them around because building new ones would be politically very sticky and you don't know how many you might need in the future.

The thinking is a little different for counties which are maintaining a minimum deterrent like France and the UK, there they do have to think pretty hard about how their nukes might be used and how many they need to hold enough high value targets hostage to maintain an existential threat to a potential aggressor but that's really av strategic force, they've basically given up on tactical nukes even though many of their warheads might be used on counter force targets that the US or Russia might attack using tactical weapons.

I suppose it's China, India, Pakistan and Israel that will be thinking in these terms but figuring out what their order of nuclear battles is likely to be is best left to more qualified people than me.

VH said:

I have heard ISIS and tactical nukes used in the same sentence. Stay tuned

Click to expand...

Why bother? IS doesn't hold anything worth a tactical nuke. They have minimal hold over minimal territory.

These are extreme positions but are being discussed nevertheless


"....So the time has come to return to the strategy of President Truman and face reality. If we really want to destroy ISIS and set an example for other radical Muslims and the Putins of the world to fear us and leave us in peace, we must use the tools that can do this. Put simply, we should employ tactical nuclear weapons to wipe out the enemy. We cannot worry that Islamic civilians will be killed in the process. In the end this strategy, as was true of the Japanese in World War II, saves not just American but Muslim lives as well...."[/size]
[font=helmet, freesans, sans-serif]http://www.wnd.com/2014/09/best-isis-strategy-nuke-em/[/font]

[font=helmet, freesans, sans-serif]http://thelanternjournal.wordpress.com/2014/08/08/why-use-of-nuclear-weapons-against-isis-should-be-authorized/[/font]

[font=helmet, freesans, sans-serif]http://www.politicalforum.com/political-opinions-beliefs/370464-tactical-nukes-isis.html[/font]


[font=helmet, freesans, sans-serif]Remember: I didn't create these polls or stories. I encountered the discussion of tactical nuclear weapons and possible use on ISIS and am posting what I find here. And there is much discussion of the possibility. Remember this is the Internet and people can and will say anything.[/font]

And don't forget the MacArthur strategy to use tactical(?) nuclear weapons to seal off North Korea from China. Could we see something like that to wall off ISIS?


MacArthur said he had a plan that would have won the war in 10 days: “I would have dropped 30 or so atomic bombs . . . strung across the neck of Manchuria”. Then he would have introduced half a million Chinese Nationalist troops at the Yalu and then “spread behind us - from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea - a belt of radioactive cobalt . . . it has an active life of between 60 and 120 years. For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the North.”


http://mondediplo.com/2004/12/08korea

VH said:

And don't forget the MacArthur strategy to use tactical(?) nuclear weapons to seal off North Korea from China. Could we see something like that to wall off ISIS?

Click to expand...

Given that there are no sharply defined (oceanic) geographic bottlenecks in that corner of the world, I suspect the answer would be no.

think underground Iranian and DPRK nuclear facilities

Click to expand...

An enemy's nuclear weapon production and storage facilities are more along the line of a strategic target - unless of course you catch one in transit to an airbase or missile-launch facility.

that's true but I doubt that they would employ a strategic weapon (ICBM or SLBM / large warhead) against a target like that. If they felt things were getting to a critical stage and only a nuke would do the job I think you would find a crash program to finish the nuclear earth penetrator project with as small a warhead as possible.

Strategic target, yes, but they will do everything they can to avoid using strategic nukes on it, even at the expense of lowering the perceived acceptable threshold for the use of nukes.