The Wikipedia page has a picture of the cannon with a nuclear explosion seven miles away. Isn't Germany larger than 7 miles wide, not to mention I thought it was part of Europe?
There are different grades to nuclear weaponry. A lot of the weapons in discussion here are tactical: something like the Davy Crockett can blow up only a city block... but more realistically would be used to wipe out part of a military base or maybe one or two ships. 100kT or less, Davy Crockett being ~10 Tons (or 0.01 kT)
The "strategic nukes" on the other hand, are city-destroyers. 10Megatons or bigger, 100x or 10,000x larger than tactical nukes.
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In effect: a tactical nuclear weapon is fired even if there are friendly forces nearby. In contrast, strategic nukes are fired when you want to kill everybody in an area.
Even if a serious war started, no sane person would ever dare to touch strategic nukes. Once strategic nukes start flying, its pretty much the end of the world as we know it. The only response to a strategic nuke is to follow through with MAD.
Tactical nukes are small enough that MAD may not be triggered. It would be an unprecedented escalation, but military generals around the world would quickly try to draw the line at "tactical nukes only". The problem is that no one has really drawn a hard line at what makes a nuke "strategic" or "tactical"... there's a smooth curve from 10 Tons (Davy Crockett) all the way up to Tsar Bomba (50,000,000 Tons). So there's a big fear that starting even with small tactical weapons would lead to a path of escalation towards the biggest nukes.
The real problem is that if you hear a big boom and your communications fail, how do you know the Russians haven't launched at the US mainland?
You're a commander of a small airfield in the Pacific and the last you heard from the US was that tactical nukes had been used in Europe. Now, communications are down. You have a bunch of planes ready to go, and if there's missiles or planes headed your way, you'll die pointlessly if you don't put them in the air. You have a letter from the President authorizing you to launch in this situation.
> You're a commander of a small airfield in the Pacific and the last you heard from the US was that tactical nukes had been used in Europe
If you hear the boom and you're not dead... then it was probably tactical.
Strategic nukes aren't launched one-at-a-time. They'll be launched thousands-at-a-time. You're simply dead, you'll be pulvarized by multiple ICBMs before you even know what hit you.
The plan is to launch your strategic nukes in retaliation BEFORE they hit their targets. Alternatively, you have enough secret nuclear submarines to launch your strategic counter-attack after-the-fact (even if the mainland is destroyed).
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The launching of any ICBM would probably trigger the end of the world as we know it. ICBMs fly at such speeds that they cannot be reliably stopped: they're basically spacecraft. Once launched, their target is effectively going to be destroyed within 10-minutes or so.
The real risk of strategic weapons is misidentifying a flock of birds as an ICBM (or other such technical glitch).
I was garbling a scenario from Ellsberg's book. I believe the time period in question was the 50s-early 60s (the same period where these tactical nukes were popular) when MAD was being enforced by bombers, not ICBMs.
According to Ellsberg, there was a period where there was no actual plan to defend Europe by other means than massive nuclear retaliation.
You're probably too young to remember, but Germany was a very hot frontier at the time and the most probable point for battles on the ground as opposed to ICBMs or subs.
That seems anachronistic? US ICBMs came along late 50s, I believe. Battlefield weapons like this just weren't in the same context as what we think of as MAD with thousands of missiles set to destroy the world. My original point was that in a scenario that they were used, the world wouldn't be blown up with city-killers.
I think yes. Even after the city killers, dogma dictated Soviet armour would pour in from the Warzaw pact. Then the tactical nukes come out. You can’t hit moving tanks with strategic nukes. Incidentally Soviet tank dominance was why the US developed attack helicopters.
