Well, exactly. Collapsing al-Qaeda cave networks during the Battle of Tora Bora (Afghanistan, late-2001) is one area I have a little professional familiarity with. Instead of low yield tactical weapons (
B61-11), which could have accurately caved entire groups of tunnels deeply into their inner chambers, we had to painstakingly deliver ordnance that was either not anywhere near as powerful (
BLU-109) or not nearly as accurate (
BLU-82). Absent the presence of nearby non-combatants, precision low-yield nuclear strikes would have been the better way to go tactically. They would have led to a complete mission sooner and more in strongly our favor. Despite these advantages, nobody would have even considered authorizing a nuclear release. The last time they did was, to my knowledge, 40 years ago during the Battle of Khe Sanh. That was under conditions much more dire, and they didn't consider it long for fear that the press might find out about it and scream bloody murder. Why would we give up such a devastating tactical advantage? Why would the threat of public and international response be such a powerful deterrent? The answer is simple: nuclear weapons are politically dangerous in all cases, but tactically dangerous only in some cases. Not many cases, as I said, but we have special weapon systems built for missions just as unique, like the
RIM-116. (How many times in the last 20 years has one of our ships came under cruise missile attack? How many times have we had to cave a bunker?)
This kind of gets back to what I was saying about the "associated brouhaha" of nuclear weapons being worse than their physical effects. The way that nuclear weapons entered the public's consciousness has a lot to do with the way they are perceived. What can glass the better part of a city can also be used to move large amounts of earth, as was demonstrated in
Operation Plowshare. In the end, Plowshare was abandoned for political reasons, not technical ones. Why? Because the public opinion of nuclear weapons, and to a lesser extent, nuclear technology as a whole, was shaped by the attacks that produced Japan's surrender, and the Cold War nuclear winter/fallout scares that affected everyone's way of life and feeling of personal safety for decades. That was their experience with it, and when it came time to vote, the scientists and engineers who actually understood the facts were woefully outnumbered by people who felt the way they did based mainly on emotion. In a way, it was like today's "creationism" debates.
Note that I am absolutely not advocating that we should have used battlefield nukes in 2001/2002. The penalties would have been too great. But they also would have been categorically political and diplomatic, not tactical.
