Is the era of nuclear weapons coming to an end?
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”
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Nuclear weapons have been much talked about recently. The interest comes in waves, often sparked off by individual incidents in the war in Ukraine, and now the conflict with Iran as well. I really can’t remember how many times in the last few years we have been told by excitable pundits that “nuclear war is now inevitable!” only for the excitement to die down again shortly after. As I write, the possibility of a nuclear attack on Iran is still being canvased by people who should know better. In this essay I want to try to calm things down a little, by explaining not only just how difficult and complicated it would be to use such terrifying weapons for anything useful, but also something about the deep and unacknowledged politics of their development and continued existence. In one of my earliest essays I tried to put some of these fears of imminent nuclear holocausts into context, and this essay is, in part, an update and an extension of the earlier one, with the added conclusion that recent technological developments may soon make nuclear weapons obsolete.
We should begin by recognising that the general level of understanding of nuclear weapons and policy is very low, even among those who see themselves as educated and informed, and the presentation of nuclear issues in the media is correspondingly often excitable and sensationalist. What most people think they “know” is an amalgam of accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, films like Dr Strangelove, On the Beach and Fail Safe , memories of having seen, or at least heard of, more sober semi-documentaries like The War Game, and, for those of a certain age, the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s.
I don’t say this to criticise, necessarily: nuclear weapons are a profoundly disturbing topic, and few people would lightly take an interest in them unless they had to. If you know something about their anticipated effects, then describing them in the discourse of a Biblical apocalypse does seem entirely reasonable. This is even truer when we take into account their indirect effects as well, on a society and a country that was attacked at any scale. I was a little involved in questions of what was then called Home Defence during the Cold War, and those whose speciality it was were clear that it was the secondary effects of nuclear attack— the breakdown of government, the collapse of health services, the absence of power, transport and communications and probably widespread famine—that would destroy the country, and would, in the famous phrase of the time, cause the living to envy the dead. Or as a colleague deeply involved in such issues once said, “I want to be under the first one, with my family.”
If the sheer horror of the likely consequences of the use of nuclear weapons naturally discouraged too much serious analysis, it nonetheless encouraged both sensationalist and ill-informed coverage on the one hand, and attempts to construct highly intellectualised and almost literally bloodless bodies of abstract nuclear theory on the other. The latter could be very sophisticated and intellectually satisfying to a restricted community of specialists, but there was no evidence, then or since, that their theories reflected what happened in the real world, nor that the Soviet Union, and now Russia, shared any of the assumptions about such intellectual constructs as Mutual Assured Destruction. (Indeed, as I recall, western nuclear policy during the Cold War took little or no account of actual Soviet nuclear doctrine, insofar as it was known.)
All this, combined with the development of the Internet with its articles, blogs and, especially, videos, has left the field pretty much clear for three types of pundit to dominate our understanding of the potential nuclear dimension to the crises in Ukraine and Iran; both situations which are entirely unlike and beyond anything imagined in the past. The first type is the retired military officer, who sees nuclear weapons, as the military always have, as basically weapons, and so to be used at some point. The second is the missile or nuclear engineer, who sees nuclear weapons as technologies capable of doing specific things, with specific limitations. The third is the political scientist, who tries to somehow cram the issues raised by nuclear weapons into a theoretical model of their own devising.
Such commentary is not necessarily useless. The military can point out the limited usefulness of “tactical” nuclear weapons, the problems and dangers in transporting them and keeping them secure, the difficulties of delivering them onto target and so forth. Technical specialists can explain just how little is actually known (as opposed to assumed) about nuclear weapons performance and operations (since no-one has ever fired a nuclear missile in anger) and something about difficulties both of targeting and interception. Political scientists can organise conferences with each other.
But all of this easily overlooks two basic facts. First, everything to do with nuclear weapons is obsessively controlled by the political leadership in every country I know of, and that military and technical considerations come firmly in second place. It might be interesting to know that something is or is not feasible technically or military grounds, but decisions are not made like that. They are made because of what I refer to as the Deep Politics and the Deep Strategy of nuclear weapons, which is almost never publicly discussed, and with which part of this essay is concerned. Second, and before we get to that, it’s necessary to understand that, even more than most military technologies, nuclear weapons technology has always advanced more quickly than strategies for using it can be formulated, and far more quickly than the political process can absorb and digest its implications. It is the ultimate case of a solution looking for a problem, and is a technology (or series of technologies) which in the end, history suggests, can’t actually be employed for anything very useful. It’s thus not surprising that enthusiasts for using nuclear weapons against Iran can’t actually agree what the targets would be, or what purpose it would serve or what the possible consequences might be.
But this has been true from the beginning. In retrospect, it’s a little surprising that the weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were ever developed at all. If it had not been for German Jewish physicists exiled by the Nazis, British physicists and engineers working on the Tube Alloys project, and fear of the Germans developing their own nuclear weapons (as indeed they were trying to), the massive resources needed for the Manhattan Project might never have been made available. The practical engineering challenges appeared almost insuperable, and it was not clear that Oppenheimer, with his Communist sympathies, was an obvious person to be chosen to try to overcome them, still less that, once chosen, he would be the right man for the job. Although the war in Germany ended before the Bomb could be used there, frantic efforts did produce a weapon while the war against Japan still needed to be won. But even then, there was no guarantee it would work as advertised.
The same is true of the politics surrounding its use. I’ve warned before against the tendency to write history in a teleological fashion: we know what happened, so unconsciously we select the material and the incidents that appear to make the final outcome very likely, if not actually inevitable. Now to an extent, as you know if you’ve ever written a historical work, this is unavoidable because all such writing involves selection, and selection means implicit or actual bias. Nonetheless, historians working with the original documents (tedious, I know) are often startled to find not only that the situation was far more complicated than the secondary sources they had read suggested, but also that in many cases, things that now seem important or even critical were then seen as routine, and of course vice versa. Indeed, it’s hard, unless you have been through a major crisis, to appreciate how banally and often trivially such a crisis actually unfolds. The twenty-four hours of every day are taken up not with strategic reflection, but with panic, improvisation and confusion, and the questions that dominate the working agenda are typically, Who will attend this meeting? How do we reply to this message? What do we think of this initiative? How does this affect our position on other issues? and the like. Questions such as, How did we get here? or Where are we going? tend to be pushed to one side, to be dealt with later, possibly. I should imagine it’s like that in Washington at the moment.
The writing of history inevitably reshapes the past and casts shadows backwards. Quite quickly after 1945, the idea began to take hold that bombing of Hiroshima had fundamentally changed the world, and opened a new chapter in human history, where the whole world might suddenly go up in a ball of flame. (This, indeed, was the idea already current in my childhood.) That is not how it was seen at the time, though, when the decision to use the new weapon was made. Indeed, Richard Overy, in his magisterial recent study , is surely right to suggest that no “decision” as such was ever really made, and certainly not in the sense that it could be dramatised in a film. Truman seems to have nodded through the proposal, as he did many others, but there was apparently little substantive debate. There were those who doubted that the weapon would actually work, or that it would be effective in helping to end the war, but little debate on the merits in Washington, whereas some of the scientists involved were very unhappy. But they were not the ones running the War.
The War, in all the countries involved, had many of the characteristics of a production line. Concepts, strategies and weapons appeared and were taken off to be used. At the time the Americans were haunted by the likely casualty figures from an attempt to capture the southern island of Kyushu and the coastal plain between Osaka and Tokyo: a million dead and wounded was the expectation and, given what we now know of Japanese preparations, this was not an unreasonable fear. (If you are familiar with the country, it’s hard to believe that such an invasion would have been logistically feasible anyway.) Likewise, there was no indication that those who actually made the decisions in Japan—notably the Army—were remotely prepared to consider unconditional surrender at that point. In the circumstances, anything that looked as though it might possibly bring the war nearer to an end without the bloodbath implied by an invasion was automatically considered worth pursuing.
Thus, the first use of nuclear weapons in anger was essentially based on the lack of any obvious alternative, and was fundamentally an act of faith. Insofar as there was a rationale, it was that the damage and trauma already inflicted on the Japanese by bombing was such that one or two atomic attacks might send them over the edge and cause the complete breakdown of society and government, and thus remove the need for an invasion. The problem was, of course, that it was not the ordinary people of Japan, shocked and traumatised as they already were by the bombing, the evacuation of cities and most of all the endless war in Manchuria, who would make the decision. The uncertainty about the rationale was reflected in the arguments that did take place, trying to find some kind of argument in favour of this or that target. Likewise, and in spite of the impossibility of accurate targeting with the existing technology, many in Washington hankered after the choice of a target which could be justified, at least in part, as military. (As it happened some 20,000 Japanese soldiers were among the dead in Hiroshima, but they were not the target.)
The influence of various portrayals of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the popular understanding of nuclear weapons cannot be overemphasised, nor can the importance of the thick accretion of political consequences and myths that have grown up about them. Whilst revisionist myths involving the incipient Cold War are no longer taken seriously by historians, and much more is known about Truman’s involvement in the decision-making process, the bombings did, ironically, have political implications. They encouraged Stalin to enter the War against Japan quickly, before the Allies could win alone. (Indeed, Stalin asked Truman for a Soviet occupation zone in Japan, but did not press the point when rebuffed.) They also hastened the progress of the Soviet nuclear programme itself, which was already informed by Soviet agents with the Manhattan Project.
Thus, from the beginning of the nuclear age, the essential ingredients were present: uncertainty about the technology, uncertainty about its effects, uncertainty about targets, unexpected and complex political ramifications, difficulties in fitting nuclear weapons into any kind of military doctrine, and most of all difficulty in formulating a political objective that the use of the weapons could realistically contribute to. The question of the degree to which the use of nuclear weapons helped to end the war in August 1945 (Japan never “surrendered”) can never be satisfactorily resolved, given the number of different factors and the number of different actors involved, but that’s not the point here. Rather, the US, with very little understanding of the immense complexity of the operation of the Japanese political system, used pretty much the only military option it had other than a bloody invasion, in the hope that somehow it would bring the end of the war closer, if not actually end it. And when the War did end a few days after Nagasaki, in spite of an attempted military coup in Tokyo, those who had argued for the use of the bomb felt vindicated, just as those who had doubted its value originally, belittled its influence. And that’s pretty much how things have gone since 1945.
The question was immediately posed, of course, what to do with this terrifying, but limited new weapon. Limited because its effect, for technical reasons, was less than that of an equivalent amount of conventional explosive dropped by many more aircraft, because only one, specially modified aircraft could carry it, because it was fantastically expensive and complex to manufacture, and because it required absolute control of the air and perfect weather conditions to find its target. For the first decade or so, in the US and even to some extent in the Soviet Union, as these problems were slowly addressed, nuclear weapons remained an largely military issue: a nuclear bomb was just a bigger bomb. But already weapons of massively greater yield were appearing. The ultimate bomb-the Soviet RD-220—had a yield of something between 50 and 60 megatons. It was a propaganda weapon that could never have been used operationally, and in some senses represents the final decadence of the idea that, given the inaccuracy and risks of manned bombing, you had to have a really, really, big yield if you hoped to be able to destroy something…
At the same time, there was obvious military interest in nuclear weapons that were small enough to be used to influence outcomes on the battlefield, and so were typically called “tactical” nuclear weapons. But this proved very difficult; the classic case is the US M-388, known as the “Davy Crockett,” a kind of nuclear mortar. The problem was that on the one hand the weapon was large and cumbersome, and subject to all sorts of security and safety constraints, and on the other that it wasn’t actually much more effective than conventional weapons, especially against armoured vehicles. Moreover, since the rationale of tactical combat is to take and hold ground, irradiating the ground you want to capture has obvious drawbacks. On the Western side, at least, low-yield “tactical” or “battlefield” nuclear weapons only ever occupied niche doctrinal areas: either for the destruction of large concentrations of troops and vehicles, or strategic targets like airfields, or for destroying submarines. In the days of anticipated mass bomber attacks, the US, and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union, experimented with nuclear-tipped anti-aircraft systems, but these rapidly became obsolete.
But at this point, we move from technical characteristics to doctrine. Once it became clear that a ground war could not routinely be fought with tactical nuclear weapons, for the reasons given above among others, the question became political, and, by the end of the 1950s, NATO was starting to develop actual nuclear doctrines. As with Hiroshima, it was essentially about seeing no viable alternative. After World War 2 the Soviet Union, haunted by the ghosts of 1941, had opted for essentially a wartime economic and political system in peacetime, with massive forces at a high state of readiness, an offensive operational posture and absolute priority given to the military. (We used to argue about the size of the Soviet defence budget at the time: it turns out there wasn’t one, as such, the military just had priority over everything.) No western government could possibly have acted like this, so NATO doctrine, based around numerically inferior forces, called for the consideration of the use of tactical nuclear weapons at a point (known in the trade as Line Omega) where the Warsaw Pact were threatening to definitively break through NATO lines. (The NATO Nuclear Planning Group was established in 1966 to discuss such questions.),
The purpose of this was always unclear, although it was hoped that such an escalation would “demonstrate resolve” and persuade the Warsaw Pact to agree to stop fighting and start negotiations. Yet Soviet doctrine seemed to envisage a war with NATO going nuclear very quickly anyway, and the Red Army and its allies had huge numbers of nuclear capable systems and warheads. But, as often with nuclear systems, NATO tactical nuclear weapons were really an answer to a political problem: in this case, the impossibility of maintaining anything like the military machine of the Warsaw Pact in peacetime. Although politico-military crises of this kind were carefully simulated in the bi-annual WINTEX series of scripted exercises, right up to strategic nuclear “release”,” it was very hard to know how seriously the senior players and political actors really took these ideas once the simulation was over. The Soviet Union, as far as we can judge, took them more seriously, or at least the military did. All of its equipment was developed for fighting in a nuclear environment, and of course its Marxist-Leninist ideology promised final victory over the Capitalist system, nuclear war or no nuclear war. But again, it’s not clear what the highest decision-makers thought privately.
Few of these western weapons or their replacements exist today, in part because advances in conventional weapon design have made them largely redundant. The British WE-177 gravity bomb, the last to be designed in Britain, was withdrawn from service in the late 1990s, and not replaced. The US B-61, an elderly design, and also air-delivered, exists now in very small quantities (perhaps a few hundred) although it is apparently being modernised. The equally-elderly AGM-86B, intended to be carried by the B-52 bomber is also apparently being modernised. Whether the nuclear-armed version of the Tomahawk missile could theoretically be brought back to life is unclear—in any event it would be a long process—although there are apparently plans to replace it, one day. (Currently, the only truly modern tactical (or “sub-strategic”) nuclear system in the West is the French ASMP , of which more later.)
All of which, I hope, puts the current wild talk of “nuking Iran,” into some kind of context. Unless the US intends to wipe out everything and everyone in Iran by the use of strategic missiles (we’ll come to them presently), which means wiping out much of the region as well, what remains in the immediate term is probably the use of free-fall gravity bombs, perhaps with some kind of glide attachment, such as the Russians have used in Ukraine. There are two small problems. One is getting the aircraft near or over the target. Not much has been seen of Iranian air defences, mostly because US and Israeli aircraft have stayed out of their way, but it must be assumed that they are capable enough to pose a credible threat to attacking aircraft. An aircraft shot down outside Iranian airspace carrying an armed nuclear weapon could be embarrassing. And where would such aircraft be based anyway? Nuclear-capable aircraft require a specially-constructed infrastructure of security and safety, and it is impossible to disguise the arrival of nuclear weapons, or their storage. As things stand, the only feasible base would be in Jordan, but, since the Russians would tell the Iranians what was happening, and the Jordanians would realise this, Amman would probably not find this idea attractive. In the longer term, the AGM-68B would be another option, although the bombers themselves would have to be based (and in limited numbers only) at Diego Garcia. Transporting the missiles there and preparing operations would take some time, even if the missiles were fully operational. F-35s from carriers, refuelled several times? I suppose it’s barely possible, but it sounds a bit desperate.
And what would the point be after all? In all likelihood, the weapons would be launched from the fringes of Iranian airspace, against vaguely-defined “military” targets: perhaps missile storage or manufacturing sites. So large explosions, lots of blast, fall-out and death for any unprotected people in the area. But what for? After all, Hiroshima is a city on a flat plain near the sea, and in 1945 (as is often still the case today in Japan) the houses were made of wood. The geography and geology of Iran is, shall we say, a little different. Once again, nuclear weapons, if for some insane reason they were ever used, would have no military or strategic utility. All they would do is to take the top off a few mountains and, one imagines, make Mr Trump feel better.
As nuclear weapons became physically smaller but more powerful, and were deployed on specially-constructed aircraft like the aforementioned B-52 and the British “V” bomber force, they began to seem a natural component of a future war: the lineal descendant, if you like, of the strategic bombers of World War 2. It was at this point, perhaps that the danger of nuclear conflict happening accidentally became slightly more credible. Theoretically, a sudden surprise assault ( a “First Strike”) could destroy enemy bombers on the ground, as well as government infrastructure and command and control centres, leaving a country defenceless. Contrariwise, it was thought, a state that feared it might be attacked in this way could try to attack first. In order to prevent a surprise attack the US had B-52 aircraft permanently in the air until the end of the 1960s. This was the stage where the cultural meme of the “mad General” deciding to launch an unprovoked attack originated.
With the introduction of the jet bomber, it had been assumed that these aircraft could fly too high and fast to be inrterceptedby fighter aircraft, even if cued by radar. The shooting-down of a U-2 aircraft by a Soviet anti-aircraft missile in 1960 showed that this era was effectively over. Doctrine had to be hurriedly rewritten to emphasise low-level, high-speed attacks, and ingenious ways of delaying the explosion itself until the aircraft was clear. And of course, land-based missiles now appeared, the first operational one being the Soviet R-7. But again, technological limitations imposed political constraints. Early missiles, both US and Soviet were liquid-fuelled. They took many hours to fuel up, (a very visible process), and they could not be left for too long fuelled-up because of the corrosive nature of their fuel. This suddenly imposed all sorts of unexpected fears and limitations on governments. Bringing missiles to operational status as a precaution was effectively impossible without the risk of provoking a political crisis, since it would be indistinguishable from preparations for an attack.
The deployment from the early 1960s of submarines carrying Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles resolved several practical and political problems. It meant that First Strike fantasies became much less powerful, since submarines could hide in the ocean, and it also meant that there was no need to visibly and publicly change readiness levels (by fuelling rockets for example). That said, early missiles also had their disadvantages. They were not very accurate, so they tended to have single large multi-megaton warheads, making any pretence of targeting specific facilities impossible. They had a short range, which meant that the submarines had to be based fairly close to their intended targets. And Soviet missiles were liquid-fuelled even in submarines, which must have been terrifyingly dangerous, though there are no records of disastrous explosions.
By the 1970s, the situation had stabilised. The two superpowers had survivable systems capable of utterly laying waste the other’s country, whilst Britain and France had smaller but effective forces of their own, in each case capable of successfully targeting Moscow (the so-called “Moscow Criterion”). This was often referred to as the “balance of terror,” but in fact both sides recognised that actual use of these weapons was unthinkable and pointless, and there is no record of even the most unstable national leader thinking a nuclear war could actually be won. (The Soviet Union seems to have taken the threat of nuclear war more seriously, as their political ideology and history would suggest, but there is no indication that they would ever have used their weapons proactively.)
After both the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (196 and the recognition that an operational nuclear system was much more expensive and complex than had been thought, the world slowly settled down to an uneasy compromise. The recognised five nuclear powers (including the PRC since 1992) agreed to progressively reduce their arsenals, whilst the non-nuclear signatories agreed not to pursue nuclear status. Like all treaty-based regimes, the NNPT binds only its members, and India, Pakistan and Israel never signed. Iran has recently indicated it may leave.
Nuclear weapons have for some time now been essentially about diplomacy and influence, and Great Power status, with one or two nuances to which we will return. Thus, whilst there is an abundant scholarly literature on the theory of deterrence, and libraries of speeches by politicians, they have little to do with the reality of nuclear policy, which is best described under two headings. The first, especially for Britain and France, is national survival, when all else has failed. (To some extent this is true of Israel and Pakistan as well.) But the second is strictly political, where nuclear weapons serve different, and even contradictory purposes. Thus, the US is not unhappy that the British and the French have nuclear weapons, because it takes some of the political concentration off them. NATO states likewise are happy that there should be two European nuclear powers, because this helps to dilute US dominance of NATO nuclear decision-making. The French and British have always quietly cooperated on nuclear issues, and each feels less exposed if a second European nation has nuclear weapons And many European states are happier that the British retain nuclear weapons because it avoids undue French dominance of European security issues.
The political advantages that nuclear weapons give you are hard to describe: I’m tempted to say that if you haven’t been there, you won’t understand, and if you have, you don’t need an explanation. But they put you into the First Division, as President Mitterrand, formerly a sceptic about a French nuclear capability, found to his surprise, attending his first NATO Summit. But they also serve as tools to achieve wider security goals. Sometimes this is relatively evident. Israel uses nuclear weapons to underscore its military dominance in the Middle East, which it could not otherwise do with its small, if powerful, conventional forces. The British, in the game since the beginning, gave up their unaffordable Empire and hoped to use nuclear weapons to help retain their Great Power status. In particular, and with some success, they managed for decades to subtly influence US and NATO nuclear policy, although in recent years it’s become doubtful if anyone can usefully influence Washington on such issues any more.
But by far the most interesting case is France, where from the beginning nuclear weapons have been seen as essential tools of national sovereignty, and if necessary survival. After the humiliation of the defeat of 1940, the loss of Indochina, and the beginning of the debilitating war in Algeria, the postwar Fourth Republic began secretly exploring the nuclear option. When De Gaulle came to power in 1958, he inherited the programme, which he had always supported, and made it part of his wider scheme for restoring French independence. As the first weapons became available, he slowly distanced himself from US domination, progressively expelling US forces and leaving the NATO Command Structure. French nuclear doctrine, shorn of its polite genuflections towards allies, has been first and foremost about defending France, through the capability to inflict such damage on an enemy (originally the Soviet Union) that the enemy would not think it worth attacking. France would not wait for a nuclear attack, but would first use its sub-strategic ASMP weapons as a “final warning,”and then, if the Hexagon were really threatened, its strategic nuclear ones. This single-minded (some would call it ruthless) approach to the defence of French national interests has never been hidden, and has produced strong public support for French nuclear weapons across the political spectrum, and no serious anti-nuclear movement. But then, as a very senior French official said to me decades ago, “we have nuclear weapons today because we did not have them in 1940.” In the end, nuclear weapons are always about politics.
And there things might have stood, until a few years ago. Nuclear weapons, especially carried on missiles and ideally launched from beneath the ocean, represented the only way in which the vital elements of another nation’s government and economic system could be held at risk. But that is no longer the case, at least for some nations. After all, explosive power in itself is meaningless. What matters is the effect it has on the selected targets. In the Second World War, area bombing imposed itself as a doctrine because the ability to bomb precise targets accurately did not exist until very late on. The bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet monster and the first ICBM warheads all suffered from uncertainty about accuracy and effects and so had to be area weapons. Attacks on urban areas (“counter-value”) became established doctrine, because it was all that was practically feasible. As guidance technology improved, nuclear warheads became smaller and smaller, and were fitted with sophisticated penetration aids to fool radars and any potential missile defences, such as those around Moscow.
But of course the same technologies could be applied to conventional weapons, since in the end it’s the accuracy on target that matters, rather than mere explosive power. Consider, for a moment what the ability to “hold at risk” a nation’s capital actually means. What would actually frighten a government? Is it damage to national museums, to the tourist area, to suburban housing estates or light engineering factories? Being brutal about it, no, it’s not. The kind of weapons that are now being deployed by Russia, and to a degree by Iran, are capable of very precise targeting. Most of the direct Iranian hits appear to have been by drones, which is a separate issue entirely and there’s no space to go into it here. But in principle, the kind of technology employed by the Russians could put conventional payloads with great accuracy on individual buildings from a long distance; thus, incidentally, fulfilling the dreams of air power enthusiasts a century later. Take Washington, for example, and assume that the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the Congress buildings, the CIA and four or five other other political and military targets were hit, either with high explosives or, more probably, with the kinetic technology of something like the Oreshnik. All the required technologies exist now, it’s simply a question of bringing them together. There are none of the complications and supply problems of nuclear weapons, and the weapons themselves can be manufactured in whatever numbers are reasonably necessary. There is no defence against such weapons now and, for reasons adjacent to the laws of physics, there may never be, if they are sufficiently manoeuvrable.
This is a plausible threat, in the sense that it is technically possible to carry it out, that the level of destruction would be considerable, and that it is hard to believe that the US (or any other country) would think that any conceivable policy objective would be worth risking the level of damage implied. That makes it essentially different from the use of nuclear weapons, where there has always been a fundamental lack of credibility about their use. That is why fiction writers have had to resort to mad Generals and improbable accidents, and why scenario writers for NATO exercises basically didn’t even try to manufacture anything credible: the idea was to practice procedures, after all. These, though, are weapons that can be used, that have none of the armageddon-like quality of nuclear weapons, and that non-superpowers can afford.
So we may be about to see the slow decay of the special status of nuclear weapons and the political advantages it brings, even if in certain contexts (India and Pakistan for example) they could still be relevant. It is not an accident, I think, that after decades of playing up the threat from Iranian nuclear weapons, the government of Israel now suddenly finds that conventional missiles are the real problem. In this case, they may just be ahead of the game. There’s only one small problem here: the West has in general not paid a lot of attention to these technologies. Think about the strategic implications of that.
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Aurelien – No Nukes?..Are nuclear weapons obsolete?
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at BraveNewEurope.