So, looking for thoughts from our military theorist subcommunity…
Since the Empire can build microscale nuclear weapons to fit in bullets¹, they can obviously also use the same technology to build nuclear bomblets, eminently suitable for use in cluster munitions. But where, I invite speculation, might such nuclear cluster bombs be of advantageous military use? When are a thousand one-ton bombs superior to a kiloton bomb?
(Anyone who arrived here from TwiX and isn’t familiar with the setting should bear in mind that tactical nuclear weapons are common battlefield issue hereabouts.)
Still contemplating the notion, here, although team “make-this-grid-square-go-away” has the bizarre image of a C-130 equivalent with the rear hatch open and a couple of airmen wearing anti-flash goggles tossing canisters of nukelets out into the airstream…
AMTM (“antimatter thermal”) subgram-of-hell rounds, FITM (“fission thermal”) damped californium squish-criticality rounds, and most popular and relevant to this, FSTM (“fusion thermal”) laser-triggered deuterium-fusion rounds which scale conveniently along the thousandth-to-tenth kiloton range.
I should probably note, similarly, in re cluster bombs in general, that they’re a lot better at making bomblets that rarely turn out to be duds, and when they are, fail safe.
Not a military theorist at all here, but from what I’ve read about nuclear weapons deployment strategy hereabouts, for any given overpressure required over some large area, it’s generally more efficient to have multiple small warheads compared to one large warhead just from the energy standpoint. The counterpoint is that multiple small warheads need to deal with fratricide concerns.
Example: a 1 kilotonne blast has a heavy blast damage (130 kPa overpressure) area of 150,000 m^2; splitting that up into a thousand 1 tonne bomblets gives, as a first approximation, 2,500,000 m^2 with the same overpressure, assuming the areas of overpressure don’t overlap. Even with the assumption that the areas do overlap somewhat, you’ve still got over 10 times more area hit with at least the same amount of overpressure.
Additionally, a cluster munition does have the advantage that after the submunitions separate you’ve suddenly got a lot more targets for enemy point-defence, and since there’s so many of them it’s a lot more difficult to kill all of your submunitions.
As an aside, two shock waves running into each other produces even more overpressure - you could design a submunition spread which causes quite a lot more overpressure in certain areas - although I think the fireball of the larger weapon might be more effective at taking out very hard targets.
Finally, since dispersal is a somewhat effective defence against single tactical nuclear weapons, the ability to spread out the bomblets might be useful to counter that defence - especially if the bomblets are somewhat smart and able to home in on targets independently.