Back in the 1960’s the Army had a program todevelop a low-yieldnuclear bomb (like 1 kiloton yeild?) that could be used on the battlefield against targets like forts, fortified positions, massed tanks, etc. It could be fired from a shoulder-held launcher (like a baziika). Damn, this thing would have been usefull in Fallujah!
Why was such a useful weapons program cancelled? Was it ever actually tested?
From here. Seems like a good reason to dismantle them and discontinue their production to me.
Bolding mine.
Some of these reasons are sort of alluded to in the last sentence of Q.E.D.'s quote, but to spell them out a little: Other reasons for reining in the early Cold War era proliferation of “tactical” nuclear weapons include the problem of providing security for tens of thousands of nuclear warheads which are scattered about among ordinary fighting units all over the globe. Strategic warheads are concentrated in certain highly trained units (ballistic missile submarines, missile silos, some bomber wings). You can develop very high security and very tight operational procedures for the “strategic” weapons, but if every infantry platoon has some guy lugging an A-bomb bazooka around, things start to get dicey, and you could wind up with accidental discharges, tactical nukes on the black market, or some guy flipping out and wiping out the whole neighborhood when he gets a “Dear John” letter from the Girl Back Home.
Of course, if we still had nuclear bazookas, we could keep them all under lock and key and develop highly-trained special forces to deploy them, with missile silo level controls over firing them. But a second objection (which has been raised against proposals by the current Administration to develop and build nuclear “bunker busters”) is that such weapons blur the line between “conventional” warfare and the civilization-ending decision to “gonuclear”. This could make it easier to slip from a skirmish or even full-scale non-nuclear war, through the intermediate stage of taking out a few city blocks in Fallujah mentioned in the O.P., on to “What the hell, we’ve already ‘nuked’ the bastards and they’re still fighting; let’s turn Baghdad into a parking lot”. Especially you have to consider that we still live on a planet wherre other people have nuclear weapons, too. In a confrontation between two nuclear-armed states, you want Armaggedon to be something considered only as the almost unthinkable final contingency plan, rather than just one more stop on the force continuum from a couple of infantry platoons clashing on the border or fighters firing heat-seeking missiles at each other over some disputed territory; through artillery barrages; through atomic artillery barrages; through taking out a city or two…
Incidentally, the “Davy Crockett” had a yield of way less than 1 kiloton at its lowest setting; as low as 0.01 kiloton, or only 10 tons of TNT. This basically overlaps with the largest high-explosive “superblockbusters” and bunker busters, which can get into the multi-ton range. But that just goes to show, if all you want is to blow up a building, or even a compound of buildings, why use an expensive, radiologically “dirty”, and strategically problematic NUCLEAR bomb to do it?
And why bother to go nuclear, when you can just go thermobaric?
It’s probably cheaper, too.
How so? How could it have been used without causing even more civilian casualties than we actually did, and inflaming the civilian population even more? Urban warfare in the midst of a civilian population is exactly the kind of situation in which you wouldn’t want to use tactical atomic weapons.