The French magazine Le Point said that Russia will deploy the smallest atomic bomb in its arsenal, or so-called "tactical" nuclear weapons, in its allied Belarus, but these weapons will remain under Russian control, just as similar bombs are stored in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey and Italy and are controlled by Washington only.
A tactical nuclear weapon has no real definition, but such weapons are small in size and have an explosive power 50 times lower than the 1945 bomb dropped on Hiroshima and a thousand times less than those of the nuclear warheads currently in France.
These weapons, which are used against military targets alone, are not included in any nuclear arms control treaty, nor is the size of the Russian and American arsenals known, although Moscow is supposed to have thousands of such warheads that will be deployed in Belarus that are no different from those stored by Americans in Europe.
These weapons, which were not used outside of testing, were created in the context of the Cold War to reverse a seemingly bad military situation, or to hit a command or concentration position of enemy forces, which can quickly upset the war balance, and represent a limited ability to respond in the event of a threat to the country's safety by conventional forces.
A "tactical" nuclear strike can serve as a warning before using strategic weapons capable of destroying a capital, for example.
Experts warn of the danger posed by these tactical or "pre-strategic" weapons, because a nuclear strike remains a nuclear strike, and most of the countries that used it have realized the difficulty of managing the battlefield contaminated with radiation and thus reduced its use, and their use on the battlefield may now be unprecedented, and it is expected to contribute to escalation, because it is impossible to predict the reaction of other nuclear powers, so escalation remains the strongest possibility.