barnest2 wrote:Don't worry, I'm following the discussion, I just can't bring any new knowledge to the table. My best knowledge is in Naval conflict (weirdly), but I've had to research this stuff for the exam I did last Wednesday.
So from the consequences section I get the idea that if the US would have a choice:
a) Be the worlds 'good guys', and fight conventional warfare against non-nuclear nations, or
b) Use tactical nukes, and become reviled across the world?
It's not that simple.
The problem is that if the US uses tactical nukes, its enemies will very much want to use them, and acquire them, too- because they
need them, or they'll lose the war very quickly. So if the US has a policy of using small nukes to fight 'small wars' (like Vietnam, or Iraq), it creates a
huge incentive towards nuclear proliferation: enough demand for nuclear weapons that we might actually see people producing them for export.
Assuming that this proliferation succeeds, the US would then face a situation where it might well have to deal with enemy nukes all the time. In a war where both sides use tactical nukes, the advantage is likely to go to the side with:
-Less reliance on a massive logistics base that is vulnerable to disruption.
-Less reliance on a small number of very concentrated military bases.
-More willingness to use "nuclear blackmail" tactics to end the war.
-Stronger incentives to stay in the fight after taking heavy casualties.
As a general rule, the US is
not the one who comes out ahead in these areas, because most wars the US fights are low-stakes
for the US, and fought in remote countries where all our supplies have to go through concentrated channels.
Therefore, in a war fought with tactical nukes on both sides, the US may well find itself in trouble. And then we have to ask, what happens if the US is fighting a "minor war" using small nuclear weapons against military targets
and starts losing? Say, because key airbases and port facilities in nearby countries were destroyed by enemy nukes smuggled in?
The only way for the US to avoid defeat at that point is to annihilate the country it's fighting with big megaton bombs: the 'strategic' forces. But that has a lot of drawbacks,
even if you don't wind up being hated by everyone. I don't have to hate you to make a calculated decision that I'm better off not being your ally, after all. And if it looks like you're willing to use strategic forces to destroy countries over relatively minor issues, you're a very dangerous ally.
Incidentally, the sheer scale of the US operations in South Vietnam, using conventional weapons only, wound up accomplishing something like this. We poured toxic defoliants all over the country, dropped something like six million tons of bombs on it, shot the place up, forced large numbers of the peasants to move into garrisoned villages under our control... and
we did all this to our allies, effectively.
The average South Vietnamese citizen, even one who sincerely did not want to be ruled by communists, could reasonably look at the American war effort in Vietnam and think "With friends like this, who needs enemies?"
And I suspect that had some major effects on how other countries perceived the benefits of allying with the Americans in the post-Vietnam era.
For one, the best targets for tactical nukes are usually in the enemy's rear area- supply lines, command centers, things like that.
Does this not fall into the realm of strategic nuclear weapons rather than tactical. I understood tactical weapons to be like those that were planned for a war in Northern Europe. Don't hit bases and cities, but the advancing Soviet armour columns. As far as I know this was so that there was less likelihood that the Soviets would escalate, and hopefully would restrict themselves to Tactical weapons (mainly due to not wanting their cities nuked).
It's a common joke that a "tactical" nuclear weapon is defined as any nuke that doesn't blow up on your own soil...
Seriously, the distinction is a bit blurry since nukes don't really care what you drop them on. A "tactical" nuke dropped on a factory does a "strategic" job; a "strategic" nuke dropped on an armored division does a "tactical" job.
Here, I'm talking about "tactical" nukes in the sense of "small" more than in the sense of "aimed at enemy forces in the field." A twenty kiloton bomb is going to be a lot more effective when used to cut the enemy's supply lines than when used to blow up several square miles of territory along the front, assuming the enemy has mobility and the doctrine to react to your blowing a hole in his lines.
Megaton bombs can destroy enough territory to be very effective at ending a war by simply blowing up the ground it's fought over. But on the other hand, they're so big that side-effects (fallout and collateral damage) become
huge, so it's also harder to use them if you care about what happens to the territory afterwards.
Also:
Then as now, the American people would not be likely to respond well to open use of terror tactics: we had (and have) a certain amount of tolerance for 'collateral damage,' but "surrender now or we kill a thousand civilians every day until you surrender" isn't something we like to think of our military saying.
Would this have worked in the US pre-Vietnam? As far as I understand it the population were quite happy too leave the fighting too the Government, until the televised reports started to appear.
Debatable. Part of the problem is that I'm talking about something a lot worse than
real, historical US military policy. We wound up killing a lot of civilians in Vietnam due to indiscriminate attacks, but we didn't try to make some kind of explicit bargain like "surrender now or we nuke one city every day until you surrender."
The American people proved to have a
fairly high tolerance for civilian casualties caused by indiscriminate attacks that were (theoretically) pointed at a military opponent like the Viet Cong. Whether they would have supported a government that made threats like "surrender now or we nuke one city every day until you surrender" is another question, one that (thankfully) was never answered in real life.
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