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Originally Posted by jason taylor
Tactical nukes carry political baggage far above the benefit. It isn't worth the danger to sink a single sub.
In fact it is hard to believe that they would not be effective weapons-they could wreck everything in scores of miles. The biggest problem would be friendly fire.
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I've had several old cold warrior ASW think-tank mathematicians verify what Lufty said. At a certain point in the Cold War, the attitude was that torpedoes were almost a weapon of last resort.
It's hard to really capture the feelings of those days. I think the critical thing to understand was the uncertainty in the enemy's intentions. Let's suppose you were commanding a US CVBG in the Norwegian sea and suddenly a bunch of Backfire bombers shot their cruise missiles at you. You don't
know if they're nuclear tipped or not. The consequences, however, of leakers for the two cases (nuclear tipped versus conventional) are very different. If there's one leaker and it's conventional then you MIGHT lose one ship. More likely though, it'll just be out of action. If the cruise missiles are nuclear tipped, though, and there's one leaker, then your could lose the whole battlegroup. In light of the consequences of nuclear weapons, there's a tendancy to assume that every one of the missiles shot at you is nuclear tipped, even if they might not be.
During the Cold War, they used to plan on intercepting the Backfires with F-14s a couple hundred miles out, shooting Phoenix missiles another hundred miles or so. Many Soviet cruise missiles had ranges of a few hundred miles. If you look at them, many were as big as a fighter jet themselves!
Regarding the ASW problem, that was also an age when you could usually count on at least one convergence zone. There were real doubts as to whether the US torpedoes would be able to catch the Alfa class SSNs, and the general tendancy of ASW to be intrinisicaly a science of managing uncertainty made nuclear weapons seem very natural particularly in the ASW role.
I think what really killed tactical nukes was a combination of diplomacy and the fact that the conventional weapons capabilities improved. Even with ADCAP and Sealance (which never happened) there was still discussion of nuclear depth charges in the Sealance, and nuclear torpedoes.