Going tactical

Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty

Thee's a reason why marginal countries like North Korea want nukes as it make countries like the US give pause when thinking about invading a given country like America did with Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan, entities lacking said tech, thus enabling the US to invade with relative impunity. The problem now is, nukes are going tactical with NK being next in line to having them.

North Korea has been pursuing tactical nuclear weapons for many years, but the latest chapter in this story begins in January 2021, when the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, explicitly pledged to build such weapons. Then came Pyongyang’s April 2022 test of a short-range missile expressly intended to be wielded as a tactical nuke, followed by cryptic June military announcements that some analysts interpreted as an indication that Kim is planning to deploy the weapons to his frontline artillery units. North Korea watchers expect the country to conduct its seventh nuclear test any day now, which would most likely be aimed at further honing small warheads that could be mated with shorter-range missiles.

If those predictions bear out, North Korea’s next nuclear test would herald what some scholars have dubbed a “third nuclear age.” The first age was dominated by the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union, the second by post–Cold War dynamics among various emerging and aspiring nuclear-weapons powers.

Factoid

Tactical nuclear weapons are often described as “small” nuclear weapons, but that’s something of a contradiction in terms—like saying not to worry about the small asteroid barreling toward your town. The smallness holds only when compared with the kinds of “strategic” nuclear weapons that the U.S. and the Soviet Union threatened to obliterate each other with during the Cold War. Many tactical nuclear weapons in the American and Russian arsenals pack more potential explosive power than the U.S. atomic bomb that killed roughly 70,000 people in Hiroshima, although these explosive yields can be adjusted to lower levels.

French Pluton missile circa 1970s. Capable of firing a 15 kiloton nuclear warhead a distance of 120 km