Current TOMAHAWKS are conventional strike only per Arms Reduction Treaties. They've since been modified not to be able to fit a nuke. Tac nukes are being phased out of our inventories as thermobarics and submunitions can do the equivelent (not equal) jobs. To use your example, a single 5 kt warhead is Hiroshima size damage, about 10 square city blocks. Against a hardened target (10 foot concrete walls), you pretty well have to hit it straight on. Anything else and the blast is channel away from the target. You can do the same with two bombs, a penetrator to introduce cracks into the concrete and then the thermobaric to introduce explosive force from anywhere inside the concrete where the cracks have allowed air in. To render an entire airbase inoperational, you need to crater the runway with the nuke. You can do the same with penetrators. As for carrier battle groups, our doctrines have them pretty spaced out to avoid nuclear strike and to extend the battlezone well beyond the carrier. A tac nuke hitting a carrier would do zero damage to the Australian frigate task force protecting her flank.
If you have hypersonic weapons, you don't need nukes. You don't even need explosives. E=0.5mv^2. That's a hell of a lot of impacting energy for a 1000lb bomb. Incidentally, 80% plus of a nuke's energy goes into the mushroom cloud, useless. So you can understand how focused energy can do the equivelent damage (really don't care if the grass gets burned). Difference between a flame thrower and a shotgun blast. The flame thrower has a hell of a lot more energy but buck shot will turn you into fertilizer just as well.
My experience, the 4th Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group which were tasked with a battery of HONEST JOHNS tac nukes. The HONEST JOHNs belonged to Ottawa. The nukes belonged to the US but the Brigade Colonel determines the release. You can imagine our exercises.
If you have hypersonic weapons, you don't need nukes. You don't even need explosives. E=0.5mv^2. That's a hell of a lot of impacting energy for a 1000lb bomb. Incidentally, 80% plus of a nuke's energy goes into the mushroom cloud, useless. So you can understand how focused energy can do the equivelent damage (really don't care if the grass gets burned). Difference between a flame thrower and a shotgun blast. The flame thrower has a hell of a lot more energy but buck shot will turn you into fertilizer just as well.
My experience, the 4th Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group which were tasked with a battery of HONEST JOHNS tac nukes. The HONEST JOHNs belonged to Ottawa. The nukes belonged to the US but the Brigade Colonel determines the release. You can imagine our exercises.
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