Mini-Nukes or Those Little Bundles of "Instant Sunshine"

I first heard the term "instant sunshine" on some NATO base in Europe in the mid-70s. It was a slang reference to the bevy of tactical nuclear weapons, bombs or missiles, even a few artillery shells, deployed to destroy or at least delay a horde of Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks pouring into Western Europe via the Fulda Gap.  These were small, sub-Hiroshima-grade mini-nukes to be dropped wherever the bad guys could be forced to concentrate.

Those tactical nuclear weapons weren't "war winners." Their man purpose was to pause an invasion for a day or two to allow the leaders in Moscow and Washington  to cool off. They were buying time that, it was hoped, would prevent Armageddon, a massive exchange of strategic nuclear weapons, the Dr. Strangelove stuff.

Some critics saw them as "gateway bombs" that would forever break the taboo on nuclear warfare. They argued that, once you use the small nukes, you've lowered the threshold for an all out, civilization-ending nuclear exchange. Fortunately that hypothesis never got tested.

The Soviet Union is gone. The Warsaw Pact is gone. NATO keeps busy with "make work projects" in Afghanistan or bolstering the Baltic democracies against Putin. However of late there's been renewed interest in a new generation of mini-nukes.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the group that just moved the Doomsday Clock to 100-seconds before midnight, warns that Trump is changing the paradigm on the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are widely seen as bombs built never to be used. Historically, granular—even seemingly mundane—decisions about force structure, research efforts, or communicated strategy have confounded planners, sometimes causing the opposite of the intended effect. 

Such is the risk carried by one strategy change that has earned top billing under the Trump administration: the deployment of a new “low-yield” nuclear weapon on US submarines. 

Low-yield, high risk. The Trump administration first announced its plans for a new low-yield nuclear warhead in its February 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, a public report meant to communicate and clarify various American nuclear weapons policies. The Nuclear Posture Review presented the lower-strength warhead as necessary for the “preservation of credible deterrence against regional aggression.” In other words, the United States was seeking a new, intermediate option for an imagined scenario in which Russia, after starting a conventional war in Europe, might be tempted to use smaller nuclear weapons first in order to win the conflict. In such a scenario, US thinking goes, the threat of US retaliation with full-strength bombs would not be believable and would not be enough to deter Russia from pursuing such a course in the first place. The way to deter a limited nuclear strike by Russia was for the United States to have a readily available option for retaliating with a limited, proportional strike of its own.

The Atomic Scientists argue this is a bad idea for a bunch of reasons. For starters, there are few tactical targets that can't be easily taken out with conventional weapons. When you do launch a missile with a nuclear warhead it can be difficult, in some cases impossible, for the other side to discern whether it's a mini-nuke or a strategic nuclear attack and they've only got a few minutes to decide what nuke is coming and how to respond.

Perhaps the most worrisome issue is Trump's stated willingness to use tactical nukes for a first-strike attack on countries such as Iran that pose no immediate threat to the United States.

Critics worry that military planners will be tempted to use the low-yield warhead not for deterrence, but for a first strike. Such concerns were initially dismissed out of hand, but recent news coverage gives them more credibility. 

Reporting by Newsweek in January 2020 revealed that in 2016 the United States held a wargame featuring the Air Force’s B61 nuclear bomb—another weapon with a low-yield option—in an imagined battlefield situation against Iran. Despite signing a landmark nonproliferation agreement with Iran the previous year, the Obama administration saw fit to train its command and control systems for a nuclear attack against a non-nuclear state. Officers speaking on the record to Newsweek about the exercise even identified the W76-2 as an imagined first-strike option for such a scenario, suggesting that its deployment is “explicitly intended to make the threat of such an attack more credible.”

What we learned in the Cold War and ever since is that nuclear weapons are a "confidence game." You need your adversary to be confident that you won't launch a surprise attack. You want your adversary to trust you. This has already prevented more than one global nuclear exchange when a computer went wrong or there was confusion in missile detection systems. There's a great premium for everyone in maintaining a reasonably high threshold on the use of nuclear weapons. Likewise there's a real danger when you lower your nuclear threshold and undermine your adversary's confidence level. And, who is more likely to undermine that confidence, than America's own lunatic-in-chief, Donald J. Trump?