Vladimir Putin announced on Saturday March 25 that tactical nuclear weapons would soon be deployed in Belarus, an ally of Moscow. These weapons would remain under Russian control but used from ballistic missiles or Belarusian aircraft. In NATO, a similar system already exists in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey and Italy, where comparable bombs are stored and controlled by Washington, but can be deployed by fighter bombers from alliance countries .
There is no real definition of a tactical nuclear weapon: it is their doctrine of employment that defines them. They are relatively small in size. In comparison, the power of their explosion is fifty times less than that of the bomb dropped in 1945 on Hiroshima and a thousand times less than that of the nuclear warheads currently in service in France. These weapons are intended to be used against military and not civilian objectives, hence their qualification as tactical and not strategic. With this in mind, their range is generally quite short: on the order of 200 kilometers, far from the thousands of kilometers that a strategic ballistic missile can travel. However, carried under an airplane, for example, they can travel a much longer distance.
This announcement follows a constitutional amendment in early 2022 by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to re-authorize the stationing of nuclear weapons in the country, banned in 1994 after the fall of the USSR. Note that Russia is piling up nuclear weapons of all types in the enclave of Kaliningrad, between Poland and Lithuania, almost at the heart of the European Union.
Created in a Cold War context, they are useful for reversing a badly started military situation: sent against a command post or a concentration of enemy forces, they can very quickly upset the balance of a war. The aim is also to have a limited response capability in the event that the integrity of the country is threatened by conventional forces (without nuclear weapons). The use of a so-called “tactical” nuclear strike is also a warning, a warning shot before the use of strategic weapons, capable of razing a capital. None of them have been used outside of testing.
However, experts are keen to warn of the danger they represent: a nuclear strike is still a nuclear strike. Most of the countries that used such weapons in the 1980s, including France, realized the difficulty of managing a radioactive battlefield and curbed their use. Their use on the battlefield would be an unprecedented field, where it is impossible to predict the reaction of other nuclear powers and where the risk of escalation remains most likely. Talking about “pre-strategic” weapons then seems more accurate.
One last point: in reality nuclear weapons are used every day, but in the field of communication, even silent. It is since September 1945 above all a psychological weapon which we use and, recently, we abuse a lot. END pic.twitter.com/jHpFk0oqNp
In France, tactical nuclear weapons existed in the form of short-range missiles (Pluton and Hades) used by the Army until 1997. France does not currently have first-strike nuclear capabilities in its doctrine, which is purely defensive.
