By Van Jackson
The risks and consequences far outweigh any potential benefits.
Should U.S. tactical nukes Return to Asia? Probably not. A new Project Atom report (of which several of my esteemed colleagues are co-authors) includes among its recommendations the U.S. forward deployment of “tactical” nuclear weapons.
I can think of very few reasons why redeploying tactical nuclear weapons to Asia would be a good idea, and many reasons why it would be a terrible one.
There’s no consensus definition of what constitutes a tactical nuclear weapon, but considering the various things it’s used to describe—suitcase nuclear bombs, nuclear artillery, short-range nuclear missiles, nuclear depth charges, or “battlefield” nuclear weapons—it’s clear that tactical nuclear weapons are considered eminently usable nuclear weapons in the context of military planning.
As a brief historical primer, the United States first moved to adopt tactical nuclear weapons during the Cold War, initially deployed to Europe as a means of offsetting Soviet superiority in conventional ground forces. They gained strategic relevance in U.S. military circles at the height of the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and by the 1970s the United States had more than 7,300 tactical nuclear weapons in the European theater alone. All that came to an end in 1991 when President George H.W. Bush unilaterally announced the near total global withdrawal of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, including from Asia. By 1994, some 90% of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons had been decommissioned.
Read the full story at The Diplomat