They look pretty darn good as "bunker busters," but trial balloons in this direction have been quickly popped.

Use of a tactical nuke would be, to put it a bit crudely, the user nation "losing its nuclear cherry" in the modern world, and it would immediately be on the moral defensive. This would be true even on purely military targets, and with little or no surface contamination.

We have been trained over decades to believe that exploding one nuke in the environment is a crime, even if you're doing it to dig a mine or do something useful. Do it around people, and that's pretty much it for your political career.

Kind of a shame we discarded ALL of the "peaceful nuke" ideas, really. The Orion spaceships - the real ones with the pusher plates - would have been fantastic.

The Falklands Whale makes his appearance: