by Steve Weintz
Nuclear weapons still engender deep contradictions. The most powerful weapons ever devised serve no other purpose but to prevent their use by others. Some people in Washington, Moscow and Islamabad may still view them simply as extraordinary munitions and tilt towards their use, but the arguments the JASONs made in 1966 still hold up. And casual talk about "tossing a few nukes around" is as crazy now as it was then.
By February 1966, frustration with the U.S. bombing campaign against North Vietnam rose high enough to spur talk of going nuclear. Throughout the Vietnam War, such talk was mostly just that, but in 1966, it worried certain people enough to gin up a classified study of tactical nuclear weapons use in Southeast Asia. The study's authors—members of the JASONs, the Pentagon's "wise men"—concluded that any way you looked at it, nukes in 'Nam were a very bad ider
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/nuclear-weapons-the-only-way-america-would-have-won-the-22469
