Tactical Nuclear Weapons and NATO.pdf - Program on Strategic ...

This trend towards greater reliance on non-nuclear
forces was accentuated <strong>and</strong> enabled by the marked
qualitative improvements in U.S. conventional forces
that began in the early 1970s with the so-called “Revolution
in Military Affairs.” The exploitation of this
sea-change in technology promised to arm U.S. <strong>and</strong>
allied conventional forces with capabilities in: precision
delivery of munitions; comm<strong>and</strong> <strong>and</strong> control of
forces <strong>and</strong> weapons; <strong>and</strong>, intelligence, surveillance,
<strong>and</strong> reconnaissance that would vastly improve the
lethality <strong>and</strong> effectiveness of non-nuclear forces, considerably
narrowing the missions for which nuclear
weapons would be required. 17 To illustrate, 1950s- <strong>and</strong>
1960s-era U.S. technology had suffered from delivery
accuracies too modest for conventional weapons, <strong>and</strong>
had thus required the destructive radii of nuclear
weapons to destroy targets, especially but not exclusively
at longer ranges. With advances in technology,
however, weapon accuracies greatly improved, allowing
military missions previously allocated to nuclear
forces to be replaced by highly accurate <strong>and</strong> therefore
much less destructive conventional munitions. These
advances allowed the United States to reduce its reliance
on nuclear weapons to a degree not widely anticipated
in the 1950s.
Thus, beginning only gradually in the 1960s <strong>and</strong>
then progressing more rapidly through the 1970s <strong>and</strong>
into the 1980s, U.S. forces in the Pacific theater outside
of Korea sought to dispense with nuclear weapons as
a planned warfighting tool in contingencies short of
large-scale war with the Soviet Union or the People’s
Republic of China (PRC). As a result, the arsenal of
U.S. nuclear weapons in the Pacific theater decreased
by over half, from a peak of 3,200 in the late 1960s to
1,200 by the late 1970s. 18 While U.S. forces maintained
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