Ripheus23

http://dc.medill.northwestern.edu/blog/2018/02/09/exactly-low-yield-nuclear-weapon/#sthash.I1biKEhs.dpbs

So, it occurred to me, a while after hearing the president of the US (where I live) propose his idea of developing low-yield nuclear weapons systems or whatever, that my special knowledge of the Vietnam War and high-yield nuclear weapons test reports indicates what this proposal would amount to. So, according to Nick Turse's book about the Vietnam War, in 1969 alone the US military placed an order for 379,000,000 incendiary grenades (white phosphorous in particular, IIRC).

I don't know what that means (was the order to be filled in the same year? over the next few years? in general?). I do know that the US military used an immense amount of firepower during this specific war. Like 17,000,000 tons of explosive force, 370,000+ tons of napalm, compared to a little over 2,000,000 as were used by every major faction during the Second World War, including only 200,000 tons (~150,000 conventional, ~10,000 napalm, ~33,000 nuclear, I think...) on Japan's cities.

Which, you know, well, I won't make a gallows-humor remark but I will tell you that the USSBS (Strategic Bombing Survey) claimed it would only take 500 tons of bombs to devastate the average city. If low-yield nuclear weapons can range from 1,000 tons to even 10,000 tons, of TNT-equivalent explosive force (along with their other destructive energetic effects), and if the US was able to make a single high-yield weapon equivalent to 25,000,000 tons of TNT (in the past, this is true), then the military could easily end up making tens of thousands of "low-yield nuclear weapons" that still if unleashed in large numbers on specific targets could mimic explosions on an order of magnitude of 100,000 (maybe hundreds of thousands) tons of TNT. And keep in mind, this is just assuming that we're using 25,000,000 as the benchmark. It's not like the US didn't make tens of millions of tons of TNT-equivalents' worth more overall. In fact it might even be many tens or hundreds of millions (I don't remember the numbers I saw cited when I did the research but it was in those kinds of ranges). So for all I know, the US military could place an order for, IDK, 200,000 to 300,000 "low-yield" nuclear weapons on the 1,000-tons-of-TNT scale, which would be equal to 200,000,000/300,000,000 tons of TNT-equivalence. So if you fired 10,000 of these at a city, which would leave you with a great majority of these weapons regardless, you could simulate the detonation of a single 100,000 tons TNT-equivalent explosive, which would be like five or six times greater than the explosion set off in Hiroshima.

And the thing of it is... well... If the US put in an order for 379,000,000 grenades, in one year, during the Vietnam War---not normal grenades but incendiary ones--alongside all else it was manufacturing in terms of weaponry then... I feel like it would be easy for them to make at least something like 800,000 to 1,000,000 of these things (hell, do you really think 2,000,000 to 3,000,000, for that matter, would be totally unattainable?). Equip them to the Trident submarines somehow (I feel this wouldn't be incredibly impossible of an engineering problem to solve) and voila, "the most versatile nuclear arsenal/system on Earth," perhaps (I don't mean to say that someone has vouched for that phrase's usage yet, but that it sounds like a description the government would use to congratulate itself about what it had done).