Introduction
Tactical nuclear weapons held an ambiguous status in strategic discourse for several decades after the Cold War. They were acknowledged in arsenals and debated in arms control negotiations but widely treated as relics of a previous era’s warfighting logic. A turning point came with the 1991 Presidential Nuclear Initiatives: the U.S. and Russia unilaterally pulled back thousands of short-range warheads, effectively agreeing that these smaller nuclear weapons were too risky to deploy and no longer militarily useful.m That consensus is now dissolving. From Russia’s battlefield signalling during its war in Ukraine to China’s rapid expansion of shorter-range missile systems, and from North Korea’s diversification of delivery platforms to renewed American investment in low-yield sea-launched cruise missiles, the world’s nuclear-armed states are once again treating tactical nuclear weapons not as embarrassing leftovers but as instruments of active strategic competition.
