In the context of the Russo- Ukrainian war, people have speculated on if Russia would use nukes if only tactically to achieve victory; the consensus is that nukes wouldn’t help and would have grave consequences for Russia. The only two times that nuclear weapons have been used in war, they accomplished both their operational and strategic goals: they reduced by two cities’ worth Japan’s industrial power to resist Allied forces, and convinced the Japanese that even the most suicidal resistance against invasion would be futile. Pundits in the latter 1940s presumed that a nation without “atomic” weapons would be utterly helpless against one that did have them. But somehow that wasn’t what worked out. Not only has nuclear deterrence prevented direct armed conflict between nuclear-armed nations, but apparently there has never been the combination of ability and will by nuclear powers to use them to bully non-nuclear powers. The default seems to be that using nuclear weapons would be letting a genie out of a bottle, that almost anything– even a severe loss of national standing– would be preferable.
Since 1945, on what occasions would using nuclear weapons have actually worked at least for some values of “worked”? That is, the immediate military goal would have been achieved and whatever consequences might have appeared down the road, there wouldn’t have been an immediate (i.e. nuclear retaliation) response? ETA: example, if France had had nuclear weapons in 1955 instead of 1965, would they have been used in Indochina or North Africa?
I think an example might be if China dropped a few nuclear bombs when their opposition government initially fled to Taiwan. I don’t think other glibal parties would have gotten involved and it would have devastated the small island territory… which is a bad thing if you’re trying to occupy it
I think and this is entirely IMHO, that this is a situation that is on the cusp of change.
Entirely IMHO, and perhaps more political than ideal, but I think a LOT of the reluctance grew from the post WW2 scenario where much of the world was so badly damaged, lost so much (even the winners) and was so weary that there were few goals worthy of risking that genie that couldn’t be accomplished by conventional means. A cost/benefit analysis for the nuclear powers. An example of this being NK - just having the weapons, the threat meant that they couldn’t be fully ignored and that they could make demands and be granted concessions far beyond their threat on non-nuclear levels.
BUT.
I think part of the rightward swing we’ve seen world wide is that the last of those generations strongly influenced by WW2 is gone or out of power. There’s no horror of another such conflict, in fact, among some at least, there’s a hunger for it, and NOT just among the totalitarian states.
Given such, I’d bet many quatloos that one or more powers in say, the next 20 years, WILL be willing to use a nuclear weapon, with plenty of deniable and less deniable reasons. Exactly because they aren’t willing to suffer the loss of face or national standing.
Back to the specific question in the thread though, I think that if things had gone worse in the Ukraine, that Russia would have used a tactical weapon. Otherwise, that leaves out all the defensive battles that haven’t happened because the other party has nukes. IE if Ukraine hadn’t surrendered theirs, I am pretty sure they’d have used one by now, and it would have resulting in a much different conflict. So, again, “worked” for values of worked.
At the very beginning of the Russian invasion, say on Feb-25-2022, a detonation of a few Russian nukes in the Black Sea or over relatively sparse Ukrainian land could have successfully deterred the West from intervening. Back then, the West still thought Kyiv would fall in a week, and such mushroom clouds could have made the West say “Yeah this aint’ worth it.”
Well, there’s an example of what you are asking for right there, since I disagree. Once Trump takes power and makes it clear the US won’t raise a fuss over it Putin can use nuclear weapons to kill most of the population of Ukraine and regular troops to kill off the survivors. That would fulfill three of Putin’s goals: Show off how much power he has over the US, genocide the Ukrainian people and culture, and produce worldwide fear of Russia.
As for earlier examples, under the “short term gains are all that matter” hypothetical the US could have eliminated any government or population it didn’t like in Central or South America, since the missiles wouldn’t go anywhere near a nuclear armed nation and so it would be obvious it wasn’t aimed at them. Anything from nuking any nation that goes Communist, to nuking centers of the drug trade, to decimating the non-white population of the hemisphere by striking every major population center.
Which mainly demonstrates that it is the longer-range effects that are what causes restraint on their use, since the worldwide political blowback for doing anything like that would be beyond severe.
One obvious example, the US could have nuked the USSR before it got its own nuclear weapons. In the short term that would produce chaos and quite possibly a collapse of the USSR. Or nuked China before 1949 to cripple the emerging Communist Chinese state. Or anyone it felt like, really. In those few years there wasn’t anyone who could retaliate in kind.
Nukes work when the target can’t retaliate, and nobody who was the target’s friend cares enough to retaliate nuclearly and thereby risk receiving a nuke in return.
Said differently, nuclear-armed countries aren’t nukeable, pretty much period, amen, no exceptions. For non-nuclear countries, the more friendless they are, the more nukeable they are.
If, counterfactually, during the Cold War the US had been a lot more of a reckless imperialist than it actually was, I could have readily imagined any number of USSR “friends” that, if the US attacked them, the USSR would choose to abandon their client rather than get into a direct scrap w the US. I’m thinking more like places in Africa, Latin America, or Southeast Asia. Not the Warsaw Pact countries.
I could also imagine the same in reverse. Modulo the US’s self-appointed role as “the world’s policeman”.
Nowadays, a sufficiently craven isolationist USA could easily render a lot of the rest of the non-nuclear world friendless enough that an aggressive expansionist Russia decides to try something. That’s before we consider the possibility the US president is in fact a Russian agent.
But they had to know that other nations would get nuclear weapons eventually. And what kind of precedent would we have set to have dropped a nuclear weapon on another nation that was unprovoked?
The thing about nuclear weapons is that they are difficult or impossible to defend against, hence the whole “mutual assured destruction” doctrine.
That is the sort of future consequences ruled out of consideration by the OP. The long term consequences would have been a disaster, yes; but nobody would have retaliated with their own nuclear weapons in the immediate aftermath because they didn’t have any yet.
We have no way to predict for sure that the long range consequences would be a disaster. Many people think that, many don’t. But until we run the experiment we won’t know for sure.
That I believe is historically why it didn’t happen. It wasn’t that the USA realistically feared anyone or anything other than a nuclear-armed USSR; it was what sort of world would result from nuking the Soviet Union. For starters, although the USA could have destroyed the USSR as a unified industrial nation, it couldn’t in any practical sense have conquered it; the territory was simply too big. And it would have set the precedent that no power the USA did not completely trust would be allowed to possess nuclear weapons, and that obtaining them or seeking to obtain them would be an immediate casus belli; it would have forced the USA, which really didn’t want to be, to become the de facto suzerain of the planet. Then, everything everywhere would be the United State’s fault, either by its action or its inaction. To say nothing of the moral repugnance against the premeditated murder of tens of millions of Soviet citizens guilty of nothing but being born in a country where they had no say over their government.
India tested its first nuclear bomb in 1974, giving it a ten-year advantage over Pakistan. During that time the dispute over Kashmir cooled down. But if the situation had heated up again during those ten years, I can see where an Indian nuclear attack would have been at least a short-term benefit.
The US had a very limited ability to get nuclear bombs on target unopposed before the USSR got its own nukes in 1949. No nuclear missiles only bombers and the USSR had a large and functioning airforce to defend itself. At best they could hit Vladivostok or Leningrad but not deep into the USSR.
In 1949 the USA possessed at least one or two hundred nuclear bombs, deliverable by B-29 or B-36 (the B-36 was designed for that specific use, so much so that they didn’t use any in Korea because they were waiting and ready for the purpose of nuking the USSR.) A surprise attack would have devastated Soviet defenses. Moscow was easily in range of bases available to the USAF. The B-36 could reach Moscow from bases in the USA; I don’t think they had more than 12-18 of them ready in 1949 but along with B-29s the delivery of nukes would absolutely have gotten many on target.
Even had some been shot down, no doubt some would have successfully dropped their bombs.
Operation Vulture (French: Opération Vautour ) was the name of the proposed U.S. operation that would rescue French forces at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 via B-29 raids based in the Philippines. The French garrison had been surrounded by the Viet Minh during the First Indochina War. When the British government refused to give its support (something that Eisenhower required for the operation to proceed), the plan was cancelled and as a result the French Army organised Operation Condor, an attempt to weaken the Viet Minh artillery’s assaults against the besieged French Union garrison.
The plan included an option to use up to three small atomic weapons on the Viet Minh positions in support of the French.[1] The Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up plans to deploy tactical atomic weapons, U.S. carriers sailed to the Gulf of Tonkin, and reconnaissance flights over Dien Bien Phu were conducted during the negotiations.[6] Radford, the top American military officer, gave this nuclear option his backing. US B-29s, B-36s, and B-47s could have executed a nuclear strike, as could carrier aircraft from the Seventh Fleet.[1] Admiral Radford was the leading voice within the government for Operation Vulture, citing a study that three tactical atomic bombs “properly employed” would decisively smash the Vietminh forces besieging the French at Dien Bien Phu, and thereby turn a certain defeat into a victory.
Use of Nuclear weapons against China in the Korean war was being bandied about, with an interviewer quoting Gen. MacArthur as saying
I would have dropped between 30 and 50 atomic bombs on his air bases and other depots strung across the neck of Manchuria… It was my plan as our amphibious forces moved south to spread behind us—from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea—a belt of radioactive cobalt. It could have been spread from wagons, carts, trucks and planes… For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the north.
I don’t know about the radioactive belt, but the bombing probably would have worked and won the war. China didn’t have nukes at the time and while Russia had exploded a bomb, they didn’t have them deployable yet… But I think the diplomatic fallout (no pun intended) would have been severe.
That’s really about it- use as a terror weapon/deterrent.
Otherwise, the whole war hasn’t really had the sorts of troop concentrations and large-scale maneuvers where tactical nukes would be particularly handy.
By that I mean that one effective use of a tactical nuke would be to nuke the enemy’s forces that are massing for an attack. Otherwise your own troops have to go through those nuked areas on the attack, which is less than optimal to put it mildly.
I suppose that they could be used as a way to break a deadlock like they’ve got now, but that seems like a particularly ugly way to go about it, and considering the geopolitical fallout, probably not worth the trouble. That said, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the Russians eventually do exactly this if they’re still more or less deadlocked, and the economic sanctions really cause problems.