Speaking with colleague Colonel Jeff McCawson in United States Army retired, about a book

he and his colleagues did some dozen years ago, Tactical Nuclear Weapons in NATO.

I learned from this book that Tactical Nuclear Weapons have always been part of the war-fighting

thinking since the nuclear weapon was first revealed in anger in 1945.

The smaller the nuke, the smaller the warhead, the more likely it is to be used and a battlefield

situation goes to thinking, are periods in which the thinking has changed.

1950, for example, to 1963 is a period of time of change, lots of change in thinking about

nuclear weapons, thinking about strategic weapons as well, citybusters.

What's pertinent today, not just the history of tactical weapons, but what do the Russians

make of their tactical nuclear weapon arsenal?

They have hundreds, if not thousands of them.

The U.S., on the other hand, is limited to several hundred gravity bomb nuclear weapons

deployed throughout Europe.

The Russian doctor and inherited from the Soviet Union, I learned from Jeff and his colleagues,

uses tactical nuclear weapons as a battlefield tactic.

It's meant to seal or break through or stop a breakthrough in some fashion.

It's understood as manageable.

There's also the theory of escalate to de-escalate, and Jeff explains it very bluntly here.

What all this adds up to is my observation that the Russians are more likely to use nuclear

weapons in order to prevent a larger war in their thinking than not.

Yeah, that fits right into the thinking of so-called escalate to de-escalate.

We'll escalate to these weapons, which will prevent an escalation on both sides, the central

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