Russian roulette: what ‘tactical’ nuclear war would mean

In 1861 an American seed-drill designer named Richard Jordan Gatling created a super-weapon that he believed would bring an end to war. With his hand-cranked, ten-barrel machine-gun, Gatling did for warfare what his contemporary Isaac Singer had done for sewing, bringing mechanisation to a former handcraft. Gatling’s gun fired more than 200 rounds a minute – as much as an entire battalion of soldiers with muzzle-loading muskets. In his memoirs, Gatling wrote that ‘if a four-man machine-gun crew could kill a thousand infantrymen in five minutes’ then perhaps the terror created by such a weapon would ‘discourage war altogether’.

Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the first atom bomb, was motivated by a similar thought. ‘The atomic bomb has made the prospect of future war unendurable,’ wrote Oppenheimer. ‘It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass and beyond there is a different country.’ Yet like Gatling, Oppenheimer was wrong. Gatling’s machine-gun multiplied the power of a musket by a factor of hundred. Oppenheimer’s bomb had the explosive power of 20,000 tons of TNT – multiplying the conventional munitions carried by a single B-29 bomber by a factor of a thousand. But the atom bomb had not brought humanity into a ‘different country’. To generals in Moscow and Washington, it was just a bigger bomb.

By 1950 military planners in both new superpowers were scheming to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield. General Douglas MacArthur – the conqueror of Japan – tried to persuade President Harry S. Truman to drop an atom bomb on North Korea. And in Moscow, Marshal Georgy Zhukov – victor of the battles of Kursk and Berlin – urged Joseph Stalin to develop a new military doctrine where tactical nukes were used in conjunction with ground forces.