Let’s Get Some Things Straight About Nuclear Weapons
Luke O'Brien | March 26, 2019
With the second US-North Korea summit having come and gone with no discernible sign of Pyongyang’s willingness to denuclearize, the topic of nuclear weapons remains at the forefront of discussions in national security and defense policy circles. And yet these discussions routinely treat nuclear weapons as a monolithic category of unthinkably destructive power, rather than acknowledging the graduated scale that extends all the way down to the tactical level. Even the Army’s institutional knowledge on the topic has drastically—and dangerously—eroded.
President George H.W. Bush’s Presidential Nuclear Initiatives in the early 1990s resulted in the withdrawal and dismantlement of the Army’s short-range, ground-launched nuclear weapons (like artillery-fired projectiles and missile warheads). As a consequence, the wider Army has assumed that these weapons have been relegated largely to history, and allowed its intellectual culture to atrophy accordingly. Most leaders in the Army today would likely struggle to even explain what a STRIKEWARN message is, let alone what it consists of and what they need to extract from it to protect their units.
https://mwi.usma.edu/lets-get-things-straight-nuclear-weapons/
