When an armed conflict of great proportions is declared in which the powers confront each other in an indirect way – that of Ukraine is the most recent and the best example of this scenario – fear spreads that the contenders will lose control and feel tempted by weapons of mass destruction. The recourse to go to the nuclear weapon is there for the mere fact that it exists. In a theater of operations such as the Ukrainian one, the use of small-dimension atomic bombs, the so-called tactical nuclear weapons, is at the moment a remote scenario, but not forgotten.
The Kremlin and Valdimir Putin himself have said on several occasions that nothing would stop them if Russia's national sovereignty was put at risk, and that includes any attempt to invade its soil. Moscow believes – more or less to the liking of the Western powers – that Crimea is Russian territory, despite the fact that the Kyiv government has once again demanded its return with insistence and with greater force since the beginning of the invasion war.
Tactical nuclear weapons are those that, if used, would be used in the war theater of operations. In general, their potential targets are mainly military. These could be complete units -including army corps-, a fleet, a port or a large headquarters, to give several examples. Their mobility and the ability to move more or less quickly by land, sea or air is what best defines the never used until now -beyond trials or tests- tactical nuclear weapons.
Although there is no total unanimity in this regard, there is a more or less widespread convention among experts that tactical nuclear weapons, to be considered as such, are understood in a power range of less than one kiloton. The kiloton is a unit of mass equivalent to 1000 tons of TNT (trinitrotoluene) and is used, in this case, to describe the destructive capacity of a bomb. The one that fell on Hiroshima was of a power of 16 kilotons, while the one that fell on Nagasaki, of 21.
The most common bases or platforms from which tactical nuclear weapons are launched are aircraft, ships or submarines, and ground transportation vehicles. On many occasions, it is ballistic missiles with a conventional load that can, with greater or lesser modifications, contain nuclear warheads of different power.
There are countries that rely more on the air force as an eventual launching platform for their tactical nuclear weapons and others, such as the United Kingdom and to a certain extent France, that rely more on naval forces, especially submarines.
As in the context of atomic power as a whole, it is Russia and the United States that have hegemony in the field of tactical nuclear weapons. In any case, the other seven countries that have nuclear weapons have them, although in some cases, given the secrecy and discretion with which most governments deal with these issues, the number cannot be specified. The nations with offensive nuclear capability are: Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.
According to the reputable academic publication Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Russia has 1,912 "non-strategic" (tactical) nuclear weapons, while the United States has about 200. In any case, the lieutenant general in the reserve, Francisco José Gan Pampols, says that any data on these matters must be taken with great caution, precisely because of the reserve with which the states treat this information. "There are no precise statistics in this regard," he comments to this newspaper.
The general explains that the warheads with tactical objectives are armed in artillery projectiles or in missiles that can be of short or medium range. Although it has already been commented that the power of these oscillates between a half and a kiloton, the level of destruction or annihilation of a bomb of these characteristics depends on four factors, as the professor of the Department of Physics of the Autonomous University of Barcelona recalls, Luis Font. “You have to take into account the height at which the explosion occurs, the meteorology, the relief of the area and the population density,” this specialist in radiation physics explains to La Vanguardia.
Regarding the factor referring to the height of the detonation, it is worth explaining that the one that occurred, for example, when hitting the ground would have less destructive capacity than the one that occurred at certain meters from the ground. “There is a maximum range of height in which, on the other hand, power would be lost”, comments Professor Font.
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs are estimated to have exploded about 500 or 600 meters above the ground, according to the book International Relations by Professor Rafael Calduch, from the Complutense University of Madrid.
The greatest instantaneous devastating power of a nuclear weapon is that which derives from the so-called thermal wave it generates. It is a heat storm – hurricane-force winds are created – at extremely high temperatures (at the epicenter of the explosion it would be thousands of degrees Celsius) that burns everything in its path. In Hiroshima, for example, 75% of the total casualties (dead and injured) were due to the thermal wave and 20% to physical-mechanical effects, that is, to the blast wave that spread at 330 kilometers per second, as recalled in Professor Calduch's book.
The effects of radiation, on the other hand, are more delayed, which does not prevent people from causing terrible agony and death or very serious and very painful injuries. The exposure time and the distance to the epicenter of the explosion are determining factors when the pathological effects of said radiation develop, derived, in this case, from a nuclear explosion.
Conflagrations such as the one caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine bring the existence of nuclear weapons and the fear they generate back to the fore. It is not so much tactical weapons but strategic ones -hundreds and even thousands of times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II- that generate the so-called deterrent effect. Its launch would cause the destruction of entire countries.
In October 1961, the Soviets carried out an experimental explosion of a hydrogen bomb that was 4,000 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima.
"There are studies that indicate that the use of tactical nuclear weapons, even if directed only at military objectives, would trigger a series of responses between the contenders that would lead to mutually assured destruction," says Lieutenant General Gan.
“Although in certain areas of the West the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons has been considered on occasions, Russia rejects limited nuclear war because, precisely, it endangers the strategy of mutually assured destruction”, comments Professor Luis V. Pérez Gil, from the University of La Laguna, an expert in conflict theory. Furthermore, Russia, unlike other countries like the former USSR or China, has never adhered to the doctrine of nations that will never use atomic weapons in the first place.
Professor Pérez Gil recalls that there are theories that indicate that precisely nuclear weapons are what have prevented a direct confrontation between the great powers. The fear of mutually assured destruction would be, according to this current of thought, a guarantee for peace. It is exactly the opposite of what was widely thought in the first years of the disappearance of the Soviet Union, when it was believed that nuclear weapons had lost their reason for existing.
