ABSTRACT
In one sense tactical nuclear weapons, or `battlefield' weapons as they are sometimes misleadingly called, are not easily distinguishable from other `conventional' munitions, except in power. They are, or were originally, intended for short-range use against purely military targets such as troop concentrations, vital supply or communications centres and so on, rather than against civilian or industrial targets. The `yield' measured in the standard units of megatonnage is small (it can be as little as one kiloton, though 10 kilotons would be more usual). Originally they were deployed mainly by NATO forces in Western Europe, and NATO doctrine had come to rely increasingly on a first and early use (perhaps within two or three days of hostilities beginning) in order to offset the supposedWarsaw Pact superiority in conventional arms. However, this scenario, which made tactical nuclear weapons simply more devastating versions of ordinary warfare mechanisms became increasingly inaccurate. For several reasons the Soviet Union started, in the late 1970s, to deploy its own version of short-range nuclear missiles, the SS-20. As these could be fired from inside Soviet borders, effective counter-attacks by Western powers, especially with their own new generation of such weapons, the land-based cruise missiles and the Pershing II ballistic missile, could not easily be distinguished frommore purposive and deliberate strategic strikes against the Soviet homeland. This would have considerably increased the risk of escalation to all-out nuclear war. In addition, what is known as the `collateral' damage to civilian centres in the vicinity of the military targets could not be limited. As a result much of NATO doctrine came to be seen as faulty, and began to weaken political unity in the Western alliance. This arms race at the pre-strategic level, triggered when NATO announced in 1977 that it would emplace its new missiles, led, after Mikhail Gorbachev's rise to power and Ronald Reagan's mid-term conversion to arms control, to urgent and ultimately successful negotiations. The result was the first arms control treaty actually to abolish a category of weapons when these missiles, which had come to be labelled `intermediate', were subject to the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987.
