I recently heard something I need to correct.

An American military analyst said that high precision weapons eliminate the need for nuclear weapons, because the nukes would be used to spread the circle of destruction and thus increase the probability of the target being destroyed, and the high-precision weapons make it possible to hit bullseye each time and thus destroy the target in one hit.

While this may be true for some types of targets, it is far from being universally true. Yes, the yield of nukes was reduced as precision was increased, so there obviously is some truth to it, but let’s say you want to destroy a big target – an enemy base that spreads across several square kilometers. Let’s say you want to hit it at long distance, even inter-continental. You need very sophisticated, expensive rockets, and if you give each under a ton of conventional explosives, you basically need dozens, if not hundreds of very expensive rockets, to destroy non-pinpoint targets, such as an airfield with assets dispersed over a large area. Also, if you want to sink an aircraft carrier, the best way to do it is to strike it under the water line with a several kiloton yield nuke, or strike it directly from above with a hypersonic missile with a kiloton-range nuke that detonates inside. Also, if you have enemies in WW1-style trenches, striking them with precision weapons would take an immense number of precision weapons to eliminate individual small-value targets, which is extremely expensive and a good way to bankrupt your side. Honestly, once you are in the situation where warfare is massive enough, the precision attacks at pinpoint targets no longer serve any military or political purpose. You need weapons of mass destruction, in order to cover a wide area of enemy’s deployment. Building very expensive carrier missiles that carried a ton of explosive each was how Hitler accelerated his defeat, because the Germans poured enormous resources into weapons that basically killed more Polish prisoners of war during their construction, than they killed the British at the receiving end. You absolutely need extreme destructive power of the nuclear weapons in order to produce effects with modern weapons, because otherwise you end up with the equivalent of paving roads with iPads instead of asphalt.

Of course, the argument against that is that any use of nukes releases the genie from the bottle, and makes total nuclear exchange almost certain. My counter-argument is that when you come to the point in war where you need to destroy cities in order to eradicate stubborn enemy resistance, and the enemy is a client state of a nuclear superpower, you are basically at the point where not using nukes encourages your geostrategic enemy to push you further, because you’re obviously not willing to draw a line. Also, when you come to that point, reducing your methods of warfare to conventional weapons makes you less effective than the WW2 air raids, because modern sophisticated weapon systems are designed to deliver less explosive to the target because post-WW2 warfare was seen in terms of either solving small regional conflicts, or going all-out with nukes. Destroying big enemies with conventional weapons is something modern armies are not designed to do, and, if attempted, it would be so expensive it would bankrupt the side that does it.

So, using Tu-160 “White Swans” to carry conventional bombs produces almost negligible effect at the target, and using them to fire those precious cruise missiles to carry a ton of TNT is like hammering nails with graphics cards. If you need to actually destroy something big, you need to arm those precious, super accurate cruise missiles with something that actually makes a big enough boom at the target to make it worth while.