Hundreds of nuclear blast videos show explosions in the ocean and Nevada desert

In short, for much of the Cold War the USSR had such a numbers advantage over NATO when it came to tank forces that the only chance NATO had to hold off a full-scale tank invasion by the USSR would have been the use of tactical nukes.

As you rightly point out, MAD strategy doesn't quite apply here. Yes, the Davy Crockett is a nuclear weapon. However, the fact that it only would've leveled the playing field probably means that the USSR wouldn't have immediately responded in kind. That said, a world of tactical nukes is definitely a scary one (Frank Herbert was rather prescient in this regard), and I'm glad we've never had to find out what it would look like.

Look up "Escalate to De-Escalate." The apparent Russian nuclear doctrine involves small-scale nuclear devices (escalation) used in a regional capacity. Their theory, supposedly, is that if only a small nuclear weapon is used in a limited capacity against a military target, a full-scale nuclear response against civilian populations (aka nuclear Armageddon) would be completely unreasonable and consequently the other side would choose to back down (de-escalation).

Now, whether or not Russia actually believes this or merely wants America to believe that Russia believes this is something of an open question. It could be the case that Russia wouldn't actually dare put Escalate to De-Escalate into practice, but merely claim they think it's a good idea as part of their deterrent strategy.

They aren't like loud, irregular rolling thunderclaps, with interesting sweet spots and curious deviations or oddities. They don't rumble and crackle or anything. One bang, a trail off of distant reverberation, and not much else. You have to figure audio equipment doesn't do the explosions much justice during playback either, in terms of volume and possibly seismic effects.

It's just a single report, detached and delayed by the speed of sound, and the mandatory distance from the blast itself. The accuracy of this depiction is valuable, because it informs the viewer of what it would be like to witness a test first-hand, but as entertaining media that demonstrates the noises that relate to the visuals, the timing delay leaves an impatient gap between cause and effect.

To provide improved legibility, the videos would probably want to synchronize the auditory report of the bang with the imagery of the explosion, and push the sound backwards by a number of seconds to remove the delay between sight and sound, due to distance.

He said that one of the goals of the Sedan test was to test the feasibility of using nuclear weapons to create a replacement for the Panama canal across the lower part of Mexico "in a hurry." I don't know what their conclusion was but I remain skeptical that such a plan had any merit.

I read that in the early 2000's NASA went back over this test as part of an effort to evaluate what the impact of a nuclear weapon would be as an asteroid defense. And caveat the issue of turning one asteroid into a dozen, they concluded that significant delta-V could be added to an asteroid in this way.