[Ichneumon]

Being only "50 miles" within the city limits, how does this nuclear option help us? Someone please explain this clearly.

There is literally a 5-million-fold range in the sizes of nuclear weapons in the US arsenal -- from 0.02 kilotons up to 100 megatons (or perhaps more). Not all nukes are the big dramatic "city-busters" that get all the movie scenes.

The smallest nuclear weapons are only about 10 times as powerful as the truck bomb that took out the federal building in OKC -- enough to lay waste to a city block or 2, but falling off rapidly in destructive effects a few hundred yards away from the blast point.

Even a 1 kiloton bomb (the size of the so-called "suitcase nukes") would, if set off on the Capitol steps in DC, only blow out windows in the White House, and someone standing unprotected outside at the Lincoln Memorial would only get knocked on their butts with perhaps an instant mild sunburn.

A 25-megaton monster, on the other hand, would severely damage everything within TWENTY MILES.

Not all nukes are created equal.

[steve-b]

The smallest nuclear weapons are only about 10 times as powerful as the truck bomb that took out the federal building in OKC -- enough to lay waste to a city block or 2, but falling off rapidly in destructive effects a few hundred yards away from the blast point.

I can't help but wonder if one of the purposes of MOAB is to provide deniability for the use of small tacnukes....

[boris]

The Davy Crockett was a bazooka-type missile with a W54 nuclear warhead. It could be mounted on a Jeep, or a three-person team could carry it. The weapon system used a spin-stabilized, unguided rocket fired from a recoiless rifle. While early atomic missiles were heavy and awkward, the Davy Crockett was only 30 inches long, 11 inches wide and weighed 76 pounds.

Two types were made: a 120-mm with a range between 1,000 to 6,500 feet; and a 155-mm with a range between 1,000 to 13,000 feet. The Davy Crockett also could carry a conventional high-explosive round for use as an anti-tank weapon. Stockpiled from 1960 to 1971, the Davy Crockett brought nuclear capability to the infantry.

The W54 warhead used on the Davy Crockett weighed just 51 pounds and was the smallest and lightest fission bomb (implosion type) ever deployed by the United States, with a variable explosive yield of 0.01 kilotons (equivalent to 10 tons of TNT, or two to four times as powerful as the ammonium nitrate bomb which destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995), or 0.02 kilotons-1 kiloton. A 58.6 pound variant--the B54--was used in the Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM), a nuclear land mine deployed in Europe, South Korea, Guam, and the United States from 1964-1989.