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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Find the training camp that assembled and delivered the nuke and nuke that (or drone it, if you have the logistics for that, but the point of nuclear deterrence is to assure that if you use nukes you die).

The point of having low-yield nukes is so you can do precision targeting. A 20mt nuke that blows up a whole city cannot be used if there's a danger that fallout might fall on friendly or neutral territory. A 5kt nuke that blows up a roughly 150m radius and causes negligible fallout could be used on a small training camp, or even a warehouse in a lightly-populated suburban area, without causing massive diplomatic problems.

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Use of nukes is punished with annihilation. That's the unwritten rule. Since it's unwritten, a lot of the fine print is unwritten too, like how soon and by what mechanism. Maybe, if you nuke your 150m radius it sets in motion a chain of events that five years later culminates in nuclear war. You have no way to know whether you would be opening the door to that. Since the loss is effectively infinite and the probability is finite, the expected value of this action is infinite and negative.

People want certainty when it comes to nuclear weapons. The only way to get that is not to use them.

It makes no sense why use of a small-scale nuclear weapon would somehow escalate to armageddon. It seems to hinge on the assumption that government leaders are completely irrational robots that, once a nuclear weapon of a size equivalent to a conventional bomb is used, take that as license to use nuclear weapons of any size.

It's much more likely the "unwritten rule" you speak of would just shift, where nuclear weapons of a certain payload (probably equivalent to conventional weapons) would be acceptable for use. Government leaders, being acutely aware of MAD, would clearly communicate the new accepted boundaries and proceed from there.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think somebody already used no-fallout small-yield tactical nukes in Syria, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsbUYJsH_SI

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